SATURDAY: Experimental Dance Film Screenings

“Viviana” — From one of the original 3-minute films made in Cape Charles during the past two weeks.

Special to the Cape Charles Wave

August 17, 2013

Saturday (August 17) at 8 p.m., 11 new dance films made right here in Cape Charles will be screened at the Palace Theatre as part of the inaugural Harbor for the Arts Festival.

Artists from New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, and Italy, as well as all over the United States have gathered for a two-week workshop directed and facilitated by Renata Sheppard and produced and managed by Paolo Armao, who is also serving as the Sound Design faculty.

The guest of honor and guest faculty and mentor is Noémie Lafrance, an award-winning site specific choreographer and dance filmmaker based in New York. She was choreographer for one of Justin Timberlake’s music videos and for the Grammy-nominated music video for the song 1,2,3,4 by Feist.

These 11 filmmakers have been waking up at 6 a.m. and staying up well past Cinderella’s bedtime in order to make these films that exist in an emerging category of experimental film called Dance for the Camera (also known as Screen Dance or Video Dance or Dance Film). After their debut at the Palace Theatre, many of these films will possibly be screened at film festivals all over the world.

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The vision of this workshop is to introduce artists on a local, statewide, national, and international level with the magic energy of Cape Charles. This town, with its charm and beauty and the gem of a theater and art center, has incredible potential as an artists’ getaway, a space for incubating and experimenting with arts and culture.

Artists hope to create a “glocal” community during the summer months, when the town offers salty beach air and the harbor of the historic Palace Theatre to create an ecosystem with the arts at the core to create identity and curiosity about Cape Charles.

This workshop and the Harbor for the Arts Festival is partially supported by the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant, Hong Kong Arts Council, Links Hall Chicago, and the Arts Enter Cape Charles in collaboration with partners such as the Town of Cape Charles. The hope is to stimulate the local economy and build an identity for Cape Charles as a hub of artistic life.

The Dance for the Camera workshop (a featured event in the first ever Harbor for the Arts Festival) has brought together three workshop fellows (Nadia Oussenko from Chicago, Maurice Lai from Hong Kong, and Marta Renzi from New York) as well as eight workshop participants from Colorado to Chicago to Italy.

The lovely dancers from IViR Danza, directed by Irma Cardano, who have come from Naples, Italy, are also performing in the dance films.

This week’s production schedule would make Hollywood blink twice, with every workshop participant directing their own film, serving as the producer of another, and serving as the crew on a third. They will be rehearsing, shooting, and editing their films between Tuesday and Friday before the screening of each work on Saturday. Each work must be under three minutes long. Also featured is a dance film of the three workshop fellows along with the real highlight — the screening of two of Noemie LaFrance’s dance films.

The focus of the workshop is on the intersection of Sound, Location, and Movement. Dance for the camera (or dance film, screen dance, video dance — it has many names) can be seen as a playground for artists interested in time-based media. Movement is at the core of film in more ways than most people in the film industry even realize: whether it is the rhythm and sense of timing with an edit, the sense of partnership, the “dance” between the camera and the subject, there are concepts of dance, knowledge and practice of the dance paradigm that translate into the film experience.

Come see these amazing films on the big screen — one chance only!