Eclectic Spread Of Bodies In Motion
The Age
Wednesday August 14, 2002
David Hinton's film Birds, caused a flutter of surprise when it won the main IMZ dance screen award in 2000. The jury citation commented on the ``joyful human emotions" that the film evoked: ``love, beauty, humour and spiritual flight. All the elements we were looking for in a dance film surprisingly were there."
The surprise, and the source of some debate, was that the film consisted entirely of footage of birds - in flight, on the move, plummeting into the water or whirling like scraps of paper in the wind. Was this really a dance film? Did it have ``choreographic content"?
For Erin Brannigan, curator of the ReelDance festival, which begins its Melbourne season today at the Victorian College of the Arts, Birds is exactly the kind of film she wants on the program.
Dance films, she believes, are about bodies in motion, and the bodies don't necessarily have to be human. And the film maker, Hinton (who has collaborated with several dancers and dance companies in the past) is, in effect, the choreographer.
Birds are not the only unexpected dancers in this eclectic collection, which includes a session of music videos, two programs of local and international short dance films, finalists in a competition for new Australian and New Zealand dance films and videos, and a number of documentaries.
There are several examples of social, ritual or popular dance: British film maker Miranda Pennell, for example, explores the choreographic possibilities of a military drill, and films people who like to dance around their living rooms.
And there is a live component, a performance by Cazerine Barry of House, ``a groovy work with a '60s score" that incorporates digital media and dance. Brannigan - who is working on a PhD about dance and film - says that in her research and curating work she has found herself moving further away from straightforward documentation. ``I'm more interested in people who utilise filmic and cinematic imagination and combine that with human movement," she says.
Brannigan points, nevertheless, to documentary and archival elements in the program. Among them is a selection from The Spirit Moves, the film project of Mura Dehn, a Russian dancer who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and dedicated herself to recording the remarkable lindy-hop dancers at the Savoy Ballroom in the '50s. This is part of a session devoted to the legends of tap and jazz, with selections from the Paris Cinematheque's incomparable dance archives: it also includes footage of Josephine Baker, Bill ``Bojangles" Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers.
And there's a documentary about the French ballerina Sylvie Guillem - but it's not, Brannigan says, a conventional portrait.
There are no talking heads, no to-camera interviews, but rather an almost voyeuristic close-up view of the painful realities of life for a globetrotting prima ballerina.
© 2002 The Age