Violent Textures of Nature and Flesh
Matthew Strasburger, 2023, USA, 23m
New York Premiere
Through movement, dance, and haptic cinema, we render the body’s evolving relationship to the natural world, shifting through distinct phases of tenderness, dissonance, violence, and ecstasy. How does the body give and receive energy from the earth? As humans continue to do violence onto the earth, how does this connection evolve? Dancers Cody Gomez and Isabella Starkey Meier incorporate freeform, improvisatory dance styles to build a shared performance that evokes the sensorial conversation between the earth and the body.

Moving Matter
Beau Han Bridge, Robert Kitsos, and Meagan Woods, 2023, Canada, 12m
World Premiere
Moving Matter is the culmination of a material-led process with artists from the worlds of dance, costume design, and film that began with a study of old kitchen flooring about to be discarded. This flax-based material entered our orbit in the 1950s, when a measured homelife and prescribed domesticity offered a reassuring antidote to bomb scares, political turmoil, and paranormativity. Stability topples as the flooring becomes entangled in the lives of those who don the material as garments and shelters.

Smashed
Michael J. Munoz and Federica Marchese, 2023, Italy, 5m
North American Premiere
Smashed unfolds against the backdrop of an eerily deserted Venice—a unique blessing only few could witness. Crafting a psychedelic dance film that explores the depths of a cannabis-induced trip, the narrative delves into paranoia, loss, enlightenment, and the breaking of artistic insecurities. The music and choreography—both crafted by the film’s star, Jean Michael Sinisterra Munoz (Michael J. Munoz), a former dancer/actor of the renowned Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Eastman and the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani—harmonize seamlessly, resulting in a one-of-a-kind, surreal experience. Smashed emerges as a personal triumph, originating from a creative blockage and concluding as a testament to resilience, creativity, and the unveiling of hidden intellect.

Dolorosa
Emma Martin and Hugh O’Conor; producer: Zlata Filipovic, 2023, Ireland, 10m
New York Premiere
A young woman yields to a predetermined story. Someone’s son wrestles inside the abyss of his own skin. A woman’s face marked by hope, pain, and triumph. A young girl rebels against expectation and success. Moving through a series of tableaux vivants, Dolorosa is an imaginative short film reflecting on humanity in all its glory, innocence, desperation, power, and vulnerability. Dolorosa presents innovative imagery and a poetic human movement vocabulary that has no limits, full of vivid color, glitter, and pageantry in every captivating scene.

Am I Here
Eva Tang, 2023, Singapore, 24m
North American Premiere
Birth, separation, death, and farewell in a small flat. Home, is it permanent or fluid? Haunting and mesmerizing, Am I Here produces a trancelike experience through framing techniques and an evocative soundscore.

Devouring Stones Up Close
Cat Rider and zap mcconnell, 2023, USA, 9m
New York Premiere
Devouring Stones Up Close, directed by Cat Rider and zap mcconnell, is a dance film that serves as a visually poetic abstract expression of personal and shared rage, artistic harvesting, and channeling the spirit of those whose land on which we walk, create, and dance. Driven by a visceral soundscape that features music by overtone singer Natascha Nikeprelevic and artists John MacCallum and Teoma Naccarato, the film emerges from the waters, swamps, and sands of the land presently known as the Eastern Shore of Virginia, USA. The movement language of dancers Jasmine Fitch, Mizuho Kappa, and Katie Schetlick melds together and breaks open again and again in moments of fearlessness, ritual, and “reverence to the irreverent.”

3 Horsewomen
Kimberley Cooper and Noel Bégin, 2023, Canada, 5m
World Premiere
Inspired by the opening scene from F.W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film Faust, featuring the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and with movement references from the dances of Oyá, the Yoruba Orisha of violent storms and the dead, 3 Horsewomen is set to a commissioned score and danced on mechanical, horses covered in silver leaf. When we first meet the 3 Horsewomen, they are in the heavens, amongst the stars, writhing and riding in and around each other almost like cells merging and dividing. As the music shifts, the 3 Horsewomen begin their journey, becoming more agitated as they ride through the cosmos. Flying past the moon and finally descending, they arrive at sunrise to bring pestilence to Earth.

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