Fransien van der Putt, together with choreographer and dance film-maker Angelika Oei, saw five new Dutch dance films during Cinedans. Some of the results were promising. The films all transcended the level of visual gimmick. In its place is a struggle with fiction and physical credibility.
For several years now, the Media Fonds and the Fonds van de Podiumkunsten have been investing considerable sums of money so that choreographers working in the Netherlands can venture into making a dance film. As part of Point Taken, as the programme is called, five dance films have been released this year, most of them doing some form of fiction. Without fail, Aitana Cordero's Harvest and Jakop Albohms Off Ground. But somehow fiction does not easily lend itself to dance film, it seems.
At One man without a cause by director Arno Dierickx and choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter C.Scholten, dancers perform as prodigious figures in a story with dead-end lines, while also appearing as dancers on a studio floor in Greco's intense movement idiom. The two layers are constantly intersected but never come together. The hard coupling especially emphasises the fictional character as a contrived thing.
As irreconcilable as the assembly of One man without a cause is, so consistent is Aitana Cordero's Harvest, made with directors Chaja Hertog and Nir Nadler. Vibrant olive leaf is the protagonist in this mini-drama for nature and mensch, where man does not show his best side. Shot in a Spanish olive grove, the filmmakers manage to create a true ecological whodunnit with very simple means. The film mocks the idea that humans should play the leading role,not just in films.
The contribution of choreographer Thom Stuart and director Michiel van Jaarsveld is surprising. Bringing Egon Schiele's paintings to life should normally give a person chills. But in Egon work and life are cinematically intertwined in an ingenious way. Dance scenes shot in colour refer directly to Schiele's most characteristic work, while semi-biographical moments in black-and-white stage a dying Schiele. Egon is a collage, a kind of cinematic pop-up impression with Strindberg-like, expressionist qualities.
Choreographer Jakop Alhbom and director Boudewijn Koole also did stage in film. But where Egon and One man without a cause by ostentatious editing stringing together different realities and fictions or making them fight with each other as can only be done in film, at Off Ground not a seam or thread to be seen. All the attention goes to the two very special performers, the elderly star dancer Louise Lecavalier and the child Antoine Masson. Filmed close to the skin, in a completely artificial situation on and around a table in a blue setting, it makes Off ground clearly shows how playful childhood fantasies and existential despair about approaching death go hand in hand. The intimacy and vulnerability that in Alhbom's stage work often get snowed under in absurdist clichés, come into their own in this film precisely because of an exemplary interchange between movement material, camerawork and editing. Choreography and direction coincide.
So it is possible, asking dance makers who normally work in front of the stage to create something in front of the camera's eye? Studio floors on screen clash with fictional characters, intensely dancing bodies clash with fictional scenarios. It seems that fiction in dance film is only possible if the character stays close to the performers. Cavalier and Masson do not play roles, they dance, they do. Not only Ahlbom's film, but also an essayistic film about pleasure in dance proved this. The Dioraphte Award-winning, infectious Momentum by Boris Seewald begins as an interview about the joys of dance, but ends with a danced dialogue with a fictional mother.
The only non-narrative contribution to Point Taken was by choreographer Hillary Blake Firestone and director Leendert Pot. What's Unfolding is a series of beautiful shots of colourful tents on and around a dyke. They are vulnerable apparitions in a man-made landscape ruled by the elements. But the tents appear in What's unfolding never separate from the creator's idea. They remain man-made things.
It is very difficult to make film without a story, said David Hinton prior to the screening of his film All this can happen. Samen with leading English choreographer Siobhan Davies, he edited a 50-minute-long film consisting entirely of found footage, clips from the second half of the 19th century. Davies wanted to make a film that dealt mainly with simple movements, such as walking. This typical attitude for a choreographer initially met with resistance from the already highly experimental film and documentary maker Hinton. "I was afraid it was going to be boring".
Fictional characters or documentary 'found footage'? Fierce editing or a seamless interchange between direction, choreography and montage? Just as human movement in front of the camera apparently invites playing with montage and animation, so too does the moving body in front of the camera seem to resist fiction. Just zooming in on the human seems to be enough.
Cinedans screens many documentaries, each of which straddles the line between feature film and docudrama in a different way. In the wonderful documentaries with and about the work of Akram Khan or Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, for example, it is permissible to present facts from a subjective perspective. Montage becomes a way of not only portraying choreography in a particular, intense way, but also makes it possible to present different perspectives in one work and to confront them in subtle ways. Both rehearsing Rain of De Keersmaeker at the Paris Ballet de l'Opéra National, as Khan's search for the nature of his composite identity as a Briton and Bangladeshi, lend themselves perfectly to the documentary's porous approach as a subjective medium, which in editing actually incorporates every other film genre.Dance film thus proves to be not only a young, but also an inspiring genre for artists from all disciplines.
On Friday 8 and Saturday 9 March, you can still see documentaries on the work of Keren Levi, Kummerbuben and the Bern Balett, Ann Closet, Toer van Schaik. Furthermore, special programmes on tango, urban style, narrative dance film and films by the HKU graphic design department. See www.cinedans.nl
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