Dance Camera West DRIVE-IN

Artists

Dance Camera West aims to foster groundbreaking talent and to encourage new work in the area of dance film by supporting creation, presentation and distribution of films. DCW presents an annual international festival held at renowned arts venues throughout Los Angeles, and informative and educational events throughout the year, to bring dance to the world beyond the stage and through the language of film.

DCW 2021 will run January 8 - 30, 2021. We have partnered with LA presenters The Broad Stage and Theatre Raymond Kabbaz to present live and virtual screenings throughout the month. Programs include a Drive In featuring Festival Award Winners, a virtual selection of international films, Documentary Days, as well as the winners of our newly announced Finishing Fund for underrepresented filmmakers.

In 2020 we were able to increase the number of film submissions to a record setting 325 from around the world, and present a diverse selection of 50+ films from over 40 countries. The number of submissions, the number and diversity of films presented, the audience attendance, the balancing of the budget, the touring opportunities, the fundraising, the ability to pay artist fees and the online distribution deals.

We created an online version of the 2020 festival to replace our postponed touring opportunities, cancelled due to the COVID 19 health crisis.

The 2019 annual festival was replaced by historic screenings celebrating the centenary of Merce Cunningham, while the 2020 was concentrated into one 4-day event into one location, to create a strong singular voice for the festival.

2018-2019 was a rebuilding period for DCW, with a new Artistic Director, new Board of Directors, new staff and a concentration on rebranding and rebuilding. The festival hired designers and producers to create a new website and graphic identity, and developed a robust film program.


Baye & Asa is a company creating movement art projects, directed by Amadi 'Baye' Washington & Sam 'Asa' Pratt. They've premiered multiple live dance works in New York City performance venues and given lectures and teaching workshops at The Dalton School, Hotchkiss boarding school and Bard College. Currently, Amadi performs in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More in NYC and Sam is a member of Akram Khan Company in London.

 

Rachel Barker is dance-maker, teacher, and performer from Salt Lake City, Utah who loves the mountains and her bike. Sedimented Here is her first foray into the film world, and has received awards from the Red Rocks Film Festival and Mexico City Videodance Festival. She is the recipient of the Alfred Lambourne Prize for Movement for her film, Sand Body Sky. Her choreography has been presented at the Breaking Ground Festival (AZ), Seattle International Dance Festival, the North Carolina Dance Festival, On Site/In Site Festival (NC), and venues throughout Utah, Washington, and Ohio. Rachel was selected as a choreographer for the Repertory Dance Theater (RDT) Regalia Competition in Salt Lake City, UT (2020). She is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Brigham Young University, and her current research investigates meaning-making and human relationship through movement while exploring crossovers between dance and theater, as well as movement-making in relation to outdoor sites (site-specific choreography).  Her article, “Educator, Artist, Researcher: A Synergistic Relationship” was published in the Dance Education In Practice journal, December 2018.  She has performed the work of artists Bebe Miller, John Jasperse, Keith Johnson, Cyrus Khambatta, and Donna Uchizono, among others. 

Heidi Duckler is the Artistic Director and founder of Heidi Duckler Dance in Los Angeles, California and Heidi Duckler Dance/Northwest in Portland, Oregon. Titled the “reigning queen of site-specific performance” by the LA Times, Duckler has created more than 300 dance pieces all over the world.


Cass Mortimer Eipper is an award-winning director/choreographer/dancer. Creating for both stage and film, he has presented work throughout Australia, Europe, Canada and the U.S.A. Awards include: Global Short Film Awards Cannes: Best Dance Film - for ‘Brute’; The Helpmann Award: Most Outstanding Male Dancer for his performance in William Forsythe’s ‘Quintett’; Rome International Choreography Competition: Most Outstanding Performance for his work ‘Solo 1.5’; Stuttgart International Dance Festival: 3rd prize for his performance in Emma Sandall’s ‘BodySong’; West Australian Dance Awards: Most Outstanding Choreography for his collaboration with Emma Sandall on their work ‘Fleck & Flecker’.

In addition to performing with Sydney Dance Company and West Australian Ballet, he has worked with and performed works by Gideon Obarzanek, Alexander Ekman, Melanie Lane, Jacopo Godani, Francis Rings, Lightfoot Leon, Andonis Foniadakis, Rafael Bonachela, Gabrielle Nankivell, Natalie Weir and William Forsythe.


Adi Halfin is an award-winning director and screenwriter. "HOME ALONE," which she directed for Batsheva Dance Company, was a viral hit and has won ten international prizes, including Best Commercial and Best Inspirational at the LA Film Awards, and Best Short at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival. Her interpretation to Radiohead's "True Love Waits" featuring world-renowned dancer-choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, has won seven awards, including Best Unofficial Music Video at the Los Angeles Music Video Festival, 2017. Adi’s enthralling work for Toyota’s Impossible Stories offers an arresting portrayal of athlete Dergin Tokmak, and was subsequently shortlisted at Cannes and won The One Club award for Best Documentary.


Holger Mohaupt is a German artist & filmmaker based in Scotland. He studied visual communication and anthropology at the Art Academy in Hamburg and completed his studies in Scotland with a postgraduate diploma in Electronic Imaging and a practice-led PhD doctorate in Digital Mediation at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee. His distinct lens-based work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and in galleries and broadcast on TV. Holger’s research practice is focused on landscape, memory and immersive technologies. Since 2017 he is visiting lecturer in documentary film at Napier University in Edinburgh.


Alex Murrull graduated in cinema and photography and has participated in many types of audiovisual productions alternating his activity between the directing and photography departments. In the field of photography he had also worked in fashion and car magazine. He currently combines his work in the film sector with teaching and is the Head of Film Studies at the Plató de Cinema.


In the last years, Mariana Palacios has developed a very ambitious project in the form of a film trilogy, in which she aims to unify music and dance with the cinematographic language. She is the director, producer, performer and composer of her films, collaborating with a wide range of international artists.


Jennifer A. Petuch is currently Adjunct Faculty and Staff at Florida State University's School of Dance. She trained for fourteen years at the Academy of Ballet Florida and performed with Ballet Florida. She also became certified by Balanced Body, Inc. as a Pilates Mat instructor in 2017. Her MFA thesis resulted in a two-year collaboration with the FSU Computer Science faculty and students creating an original interactive software for the stage called ViFlow. She creates screen dances, projections and uses new technology to enhance the performance experience.


Henrique Pina (b. 1987) studied Film & Screen Practice at the University of Roehampton, London, from 2005 to 2008. He returned to his hometown and worked for two years in Krypton Productions, a film production company based in Lisbon, Portugal. He had his directorial debut in 2011 with the short film "Tejo", which premiered at the New York International Film Festival and received an award at Prémios ZON - Creativity and Multimedia. He was one of four Portuguese young filmmakers invited to direct a film to be screened at the Lisbon and Estoril Film Festival, which gave birth to the short documentary "Passerby". His second fiction short film "The World Falls Apart (and still people fall in love)", won the award for Best National Fiction, in Oporto International Short Film Festival. Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse (2017) was his first feature-length documentary, screened in more than 12 film festivals across three continents.


Jonathan Redavid is a choreographer for So You Think You Can Dance, DWTS Live 2020, Flirty Dancing, The Masked Singer, Premios Juvuntud – Marc Anthony, Maluma, Wisin, J Balvin, Ozuna. Associate Choreographer for Pharrell Williams in the Karl Lagerfeld – Chanel film The Reincarnation, for Gwen Stefani, Matthew Morrison and The Human Nature Live. Redavid‘s Choreography can also be seen in “Spiegelworld” Absinthe at Caesars Palace Las Vegas, Laura Pausini – Simili World Tour, Amici , Superfruit MV Worth it, RAF – Sono io Tour, Elisa – Heart Tour, L.O.L Surprise, Garnier, Nestle’ And Pupa. He Has Worked With Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Jason Derulo, Ricky Martin, Ne-Yo, Mariah Carey, P!NK, Kelly Clarkson, Ellie Goulding, Fergie, Justin Bieber, Jessie J, Will Butler, Capital Cities, Emma Stone. He played the role of the Three Legged Man “Frank Lentini” in the 20th Century Fox musical drama film The Greatest Showman starring Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron. He has been The Choreographer for 8th Seasons of X Factor Italy and Assoc. Choreographer for the film The Tourist starring (Angelina Jolie & Johnny Depp). He also has been the Artistic Director and Choreographer for Hugo Boss, Triumph, Sloggi, Jean Louis David and Wella. Jonathan Redavid started dancing at the age of 5, ballroom and swing in his hometown near Milan, Italy. He has worked in show business since the age of 2 years old, dividing his time between cinema, TV, fashion and print.


Garry Stewart was appointed the Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) in 1999. He has created a significant repertoire of works for ADT which have become renowned for their ambitious artistic collaborations, rigorous research and a compelling movement vocabulary. His works have toured to some of the most prestigious theatres in the world including Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), The Joyce Theater (New York) and Sadlers Wells (London). He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the inaugural Australia Council Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance. Stewart has been commissioned by a number of other companies including Ballet Du Rhin, Rambert Dance Company (UK), Birmingham Royal Ballet (UK), Royal Flanders Ballet (Belgium), tanz mainz (Germany), Royal New Zealand Ballet, The Birmingham Royal Ballet, The Australian Ballet and West Australian Ballet.


Robbie Synge (Cairngorms) and Julie Cleves (London) are performance artists. Their work together playfully investigates cooperative, embodied solutions to access problems, often involving simple DIY-made objects.

Program Notes

Program A

SAT, JAN 30, 2021 at 5:30 PM
SUN, JAN 31, 2021 at 8 PM

Sedimented Here
Director/Choreographer: Rachel Barker (United States, 6:40)
This dance film shot in Moab, Utah explores relationship between the moving body and outdoor environment, asking "what movement belongs here"? The dancers immerse themselves in the red rock, water, and sand as the perspective shifts from intimate close-ups to grandiose panoramas, bringing the viewer into this visceral desert world.

Traces
Director/Choreographer: Alex Murrull (Spain, 8:25)
Two strangers share a room for hours in different shifts. Their loneliness is broken as they find each others objects. A relationship that inhabits a space between fantasy and reality soon emerges.

4
Director: Mariana Palacios, Choreographer: Adrián del Arroyo (Sweden, 11:47)
4 is an experimental short film featuring music & dance that brings the audience to a research space to identify the source of balance and proportions in the combined art forms. Two pianists and two dancers travel together in a retro-futuristic quest for knowledge through pulse and rhythm, creating a progressive and hypnotic piece, and placing the piano as a common operating table for their interaction. The music features extended piano techniques in an intense, minimalist score.

Earth Odyssey - Asaf Avidan
Director: Adi Halfin, Choreographer: Dancers (Germany, 4:31)
Earth Odyssey was made by dancers from different continents filming themselves in their confinement with their personal phones and computers. It was made in the first week of April 2020 while almost 2 billion people around the globe were unable to move freely due to the restrictions imposed in an attempt to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Beast
Director: Henrique Pina, Choreographer: Victor Hugo Pontes (Portugal, 10:08)
Beast portrays an encounter between the choreographer Victor Hugo Pontes and Braga Municipal Stadium, by the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Order and disorder. Men and beasts in flocks. Wild conquest among mute roars. Concrete and stone. Light and shadow. Color. Immensity and vertigo. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Chrysalis. The hatching of beasts.

Liminality
Director: Jennifer Akalina Petuch, Director/Choreographer: Annali Rose (United States. 7:45)
Liminality is inspired by reimagining what Odette may have experienced upon plunging to her death in the lake from the classical ballet "Swan Lake". It is a moment of suspended reality and a story of disenchantment, self-discovery and transformation. In our modern world we know that “happily ever after” is a journey and we have the ability to exercise our own agency to create our experience. In our story, the heroine is exploring the space in between life and death. She is coming to terms with the end of her world as she knew it and finding the strength and courage to move into a new existence. We see this story as a metaphor for what many ballet dancers experience upon the imminent journey of their retirement from professional careers. On stage there is always a happy ending.

where the spiders live
Director: Holger Mohaupt, Choreographer: Felix Watts (United Kingdom, 2:43)

ESCAPE
Director/Choreographer: Heidi Duckler; Felipe Díaz Galarce (United States,13:30)
In November 2019 Heidi Duckler Dance performed as part of the international programming in Concepción, Chile. The company arrived at a time of mass protests fueled by the increased cost of living and prevalent inequality in Chile. Despite the rising fear of violence and feelings of trauma coming back from the days of the dictatorship, the festivals moved forward with their programming. Duckler, impacted by the protests, decided to create a film titled, ESCAPE, that reveals the correlation between the Chilean and American experiences. The team traveled and filmed in Valdivia, Concepción, and Los Ángeles, Chile, listening to the stories of local residents, using dance as a tool of expression and resistance. Now as we confront police brutality in America face a global crisis, the themes of fear, increasing inequality, and unstable leadership feel more relevant than ever and are explored through this cinematic experience.
 

Program B

SAT, JAN 30, 2021 at 8 PM
SUN, JAN 31, 2021 at 5:30 PM

Dusk
Director: Henrique Pina, Choreographer: Olga Roriz (Portugal. 7:52)
Dusk portrays an encounter between the choreographer Olga Roriz and Mudas – Contemporary Art Museum, in Madeira island, by the architect Paulo David. Horizon. Sea. Sky. Rock over the sea. A spiraling run from an interior to an exterior. A body thrown into the space. The quest’s anxiety.

ID
Director/Choreographer: Cass Mortimer Eipper (Australia, 5:58)
ID follows six dancers in communion, each driven by their own instinctive impulses which manifest fast and slow. Propelled like machines through dispositions and space, oscillations of awareness illuminate shared conflicts — within the self, the couple and the tribe.

Forest Floor
Director/Choreographer: Robbie Synge (United Kingdom, 4:47)
Shot in Abernethy Forest in The Cairngorms, Forest Floor considers different bodies and physical access challenges in a rural location. Close friends Julie and Robbie sit quietly together on the ground, a simple idea requiring a novel approach.

Second Seed
Director/Choreographer: Baye & Asa (United States, 15:24)
Second Seed is a dance horror film responding to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Griffith's film is a veneration of the KKK, painting the Klan as saviors of a white race in danger as American culture and politics begin to shift after the American Civil War. It highlights a fundamental White supremacist delusion that continues to plague this country: that White people are inherently superior, and that they are politically and culturally under attack. Second Seed grapples with this White delusion.

Lost Horse - Asaf Avidan
Director: Adi Halfin, Choreographers: Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber (Germany, 3:00)
Armed with their own camera, modern dance power-couple Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber set about documenting their intimate daily lives in a new genre of “Musical” style documentary. Mixing improvised choreography driven by their immediate emotions with the relentless, never-stopping rolling of the camera, the two created an abundance of scenes reflecting the many aspects of a relationship full of multitudes. A life full of beginnings and endings coexisting in us all. Following the video for Earth Odyssey, Director/Editor Adi Halfin’s vision for this video was another creative solution for a period where it is virtually impossible to create international collaborations due to the restrictions as a result of the global pandemic. After many ideas for the video were put down due to the inability to bring dancers and film crew together. She decided to go with the flow and have the dancers film themselves. Mixing their dance into a documentation of their personal life. In the end - this actually proved to be an advantage and allowed a more intimate and close-up view of the couple’s lives.

THE KING
Director/Choreographer: Jonathan Redavid (United States, 4:21)

Being
Director: Pablo Destito and Agustina Videla, Choreographer: Agustina Videla (Argentina, 7:14)
Being captures the restorative power that draws the dancer to the dance. Away from a life of sidewalks and cellphones, where beauty is unnoticed, time stops so it may start again. The dance restores the self, and the senses reconnect with the world, like a flower bouncing back from destruction.

The Circadian Cycle
Director/Choreographer: Garry Stewart (Australia, 16:11, short)
The Circadian Cycle is a short film conceived and directed by Garry Stewart, with cinematography from renowned director and film maker Cordelia Beresford. Filmed within the stunning South Australian landscape, The Circadian Cycle draws upon choreography from Australian Dance Theatre’s award winning mainstage work The Beginning of Nature. Using the dancing body as a metaphor, The Circadian Cycle examines morphology, biological rhythm and animal behavior. The film charts a day from sunrise to evening, moving through cycles of nature, from nascence and awakening to predation and death.