The 11th annual Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film and Video kicks off tomorrow for a five-day run, and curator Kathleen Smith has once again cast her net across Canada and the world to reel in the very best "dance-media collisions" to fill the screen. What follows is a peek at some of this year's dance-film highlights.
Documentaries have always played an important role in dance film, and Dance of the Warrior (on Saturday) by Montreal's Marie Brodeur is an honourable new member. Filmmaker Brodeur is a former dancer who spent years researching the fascinating topic of ritualized war dances, which she sees as the sublimation of aggression. Her heady collection of strange bedfellows includes a Croatian sword dance dating back to the Crusades, a Canadian Black Watch Regiment military drill, various Asian martial arts, and a Parisian hip-hop dancer.
This film is also as much an artistic event as a historical one, because Brodeur's throughline is the Parisian-Algerian visual artist Sid' Ali, a former warrior himself, who punctuates the dance sequences with his vibrant folk art, which he paints on walls, glass and anything else that's standing still. To see the Chinese lion dance, for example, followed by Ali's inspired, expressionistic art, gives the movement itself a deeper layer of meaning.
The most astonishing aspect of this gorgeous film is that Brodeur has managed to film each dance sequence in a vacuum. Whether in a Paris street, an African jungle or a North American prairie, there is no other human element visible but the dance itself, standing as a solitary icon of peace. For, as the voice-over narration says: "When the warriors are dancing, they are not at war."
The festival is also featuring full-length fictional movies for the first time, and the intriguing Satin Rouge (Thursday), set in Tunisia, is writer-director Raja Amari's homage to belly-dancing, which she clearly equates with liberation. The film follows the growing sophistication of a mousy, widowed seamstress after she has discovered the joys of belly-dancing.
A subplot is Lilia's strained relationship with her mutinous teenage daughter, and the fascination of the film is witnessing the rebellion of both mother and daughter, made more complicated by the fact that they are having affairs with the same man, a drummer in a belly-dance orchestra. Amari's evocation of the sleazy side of belly-dance cabarets is graphic and raw, and the film oozes sexuality, both overt and repressed.
Global Moves (Friday) showcases foreign dance film, and Motion Control (Britain) and Hit and Run (Ireland) are two examples of the exciting, creative happenings that can occur when directors and choreographers come imaginatively together.
Motion Control is a stunner. Liz Aggiss is a dancer well past her prime, but she rivets the eye with every move. Director David Anderson, working with choreography by Aggiss and Billy Cowie, has placed the aging Aggiss in elaborate settings and costumes that make her seem positively gothic, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. His idea is containment. He begins by having her focus on her own aging, like the delicious horror of looking in her mirror, and then he confines her body in various ways as a metaphor for the ravages of time.
For example, she is forced to dance curled in the fetal position in a hole in the wall, and then, wearing an elaborate, red ballgown, she is allowed to move only her upper body as her feet are pinned somehow beneath the folds of the skirt. Her hilarious bends and twists are somehow tragic, and the whole film is poignant, if high camp, melodrama at its best.
Director John Comiskey uses the eight good-looking dancers from CoisCeim Dance Theatre and David Bolger's scary choreography to show the casual sex and violence of urban gangs in Hit and Run. Bolger's movement is loose, lanky and carefree as the dancers rampage through an abandoned industrial site, but this ease belies the hair-trigger tempers that cause assault and murder, with the women being the aggressors.
It is because everything is so casual that it is terrifying, and Comiskey's fast cuts and constantly changing camera angles add to the restless spirit of the piece. A scene amid urinals shows the dancers at their cheeky best, while the many encounters of one-upmanship increase the viewer's unease.
Always popular are Canada Dances (Saturday) and An Evening of Bravo!FACT Dance Shorts (tomorrow). What is notable in both programs is the growing artistry and willingness to experiment with the camera on the part of the directors. For example, Shadowboxing and Ghost World, both part of Canada Dances, are light-years apart in vision, but equally effective.
In the former, director Jason Ebanks has placed the dancers of the D4C hip-hop squad in grainy black and white, with the focus on shadowy body parts revealed through rapid-fire edits. We may not see the complete dancers, but we are certainly aware of their energy, and because of the darkness, their menace.
Ghost World, on the other hand, sets dancer-choreographers Sioned Watkins and Sarah Williams against a dazzling white background, and director Alex Geng has opted to film their high-energy physicality by capturing their entire bodies in the frame all the time.
Also fascinating is the transformation that dances one has seen as live performances undergo on film, and Bravo!FACT has several intriguing examples. Director Sandi Somers has broadened Nicole Mion's The Riders to include a lesbian bar scene, which certainly gives the female duet a definite context.
In Peep Show, director Robert DeLeskie has taken an already funny duet by David Danzon and Sylvie Bouchard, and made this robotic mating dance even funnier by treating it as a dirty movie. Director Gregory Nixon decided that Malgorzata Nowacka's urban, gender-bashing duet would be better served within a cocoon of plastic, and the rippling distortions of the two bodies as seen through this hazy prism speak eloquently of the male-female disconnect.
Other Moving Pictures programs include a screening of Deepa Mehta's new film Bollywood/Hollywood (Thursday), Riccione TTV, a tribute to Italian dance film (Friday), The Pitch, where aspiring filmmakers sell their dance film ideas (Saturday), and Liquid Bodies: An evening of Experimental Cinema, Movement & Performance (Sunday). Moving Pictures runs from tomorrow through Sunday at various Toronto venues. For information, 416-961-5424. Tour dates include Calgary on Nov. 14; Lethbridge, Nov. 15; Winnipeg, Nov. 19. For other dates, visit http://www.movingpicturesfestival.com.