PICKS 1
OCTOBER 2ND - OCTOBER 4TH | Run Time: 65minsEnjoy a curation of 9 dance films that span themes and continents. Films are from the United States, Spain, Brazil, China, France, and Norway, and include Oregon Artists! These works bring movement and film together to engage with themes of belonging, almost encounters, archetypal exploration, womanly innocence, collaborative design, embodied adverbs, fable, returning, and white-victimhood.
Picks 1 will be available for your viewing pleasure and edification for 72 hours. Once you’ve purchased your ticket you’ll receive a link to screen the films. The films will become available to watch at 12:01 am Pacific Time on October 2nd and viewing will close at 11:59 pm Pacific Time on October 4th.
Where We're Going
UNITED STATES
Directors Heidi Duckler, Katherine Helen Fisher
Director of Photography Shimmy Boyle
Choreographer Heidi Duckler
Dancers Raymond Ejiofor, Tess Hewlett, Ryan Walker Page, Himerria Wortham, Ching Ching Wong
Composer Joe Cunningham
Producers Caroline Haydon, Raphaelle Ziemba
Costume Designer Debby Weiss
Costume Supervisor Mimi Haddon
Graphics Dan Evans
Where We’re Going: Filmed on the rooftop of the historic Bendix Building in the garment district of Los Angeles where Heidi Duckler has her office space, this work is choreographed by Heidi Duckler and performed by her dancers, her staff and several workers from the building. This short work explores a common feeling in Duckler’s oeuvre – a sense of belonging and how we define family.
Heidi Duckler: Awards include the Distinguished Dance Alumna award from the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, the Dance/USA and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Engaging Dance Audiences award, and the National Endowment of the Arts American Masterpiece award. Duckler was a recipient of the 2019 Oregon Dance Film Commission and her work received the award for Best Choreography For the Lens at Verve Dance Film Festival.
Instagram: @heididuckler
Traces
SPAIN
Director Alex Murrull
Director of Photography Frederic Comí
Choreographer María Rovira
Dancers Paula Tato & Junyi Sun
Composer Dabú
A room, two strangers and a relationship between fantasy and reality.
Instagram: @yaqdistribucion
The Woman
OREGON ARTIST
Director Monika Field
Director of Photography Robert Uehlin
Choreographer Monika Field and Celine Bouly
Dancer Celine Bouly
Composer Lee Brooks
Producer Lisa Whitridge
The Woman began with discussions and free writing among our producer, dancer and myself early in 2019. We adopted the theme that a destructive element was sometimes required to foster new growth; perhaps something as inconsequential as nipping off small fruit buds to ensure larger fruit overall. Shortly we began choreography under a parallel motto, that grammar is to language what manners are to society: the sand to the pearl, in other words. We wanted organic forms married to visual representations of, say, a comma, an exclamation mark and so on. All three of us are mothers and acquainted as well with mothering’s inevitable guilt, which speaks to the personal in the social, yes, but also the question of just authority. I was soon thinking in terms of Demeter and the complexity of Euripides’ Medea seeking to set a wrong right. With a more or less contemporary and haunting example of our theme we frame The Woman with a reference to Gerhart Richter’s portraits “Confrontation” from the Oktober 18, 1977 cycle. Paintings, I would argue, about a horrific act and social authority. Monika Field
Robert Uehlin is an award-winning screendance cinematographer : Grand Jury Award from 40 North Dance Film Festival for Enso in 2014 Audience Choice Award from Northwest Screendance Exhibition for Enso in 2014 Best biographical documentary from Oregon Indépendant Film Festival for The New Alchemist in 2012.
Instagram: @Dancefilmthewoman
Apple apple
CHINA
Director, Director of Photography, & Choreographer JIANG XIONG
Dancers Wei Wei, Peng MIngcheng, Xiao Qi, Zhang Xi, Jiang Yani, & Yang Yang
Composers 日落山風起 – 李剑鸿/从前慢 – 燕池/Shepherd Boy – 王宇波
The concept of this video comes from my growth experience and thinking about women’s perspective. The symbol “Apple” runs through the entire work, metaphorizing and expressing my thinking about growth / youth. Innocence-Confused-Accepted-Devoured- Return … If this process uses a taste to describe the feeling after viewing, it is like eating a bite of ripe plums, which is memorable, but it is the residual sour taste.
Instagram: @j_x.iong
O Abraço Logo Vem (Hug Soon Comes)
BRAZIL
Director Paulo Accioly
Directors of Photography Perola Pitta
Choreographer Paulo Accioly, Jeane Rocha and Samuel Pitta
Dancer Jeane Rocha and Samuel Pitta
Composer Igor Peixoto
Artists de Ilustration Marcelo Nunes, Wini, Joao Paulo Dantas, Emilie Pria, Lyara Cavalcanti, Kaio Moreira, Gabriel Alipio, Tiziano, Jean Costache, Ismail Bazri, Mayara Craveiro, Daniel Ribeiro, Andrea Ferrari, Haroldo Adilmo, Fernanda Duarte, Matheus Sa, Nathan, Donovan Delis-McCarthy, Julia Santos, Claudealex Farias, Sarah Duran, Yasmin Falcao, Ana Luiza Mendonça, Elea Jeanne, Naricla, Gabrielle Tenorio, Beatriz Azevedo, Yonà, Marcos Vinicius, Debora Vasconcellos, Lucas Cardoso, Ricardo Antonio, Iury Simoes, Maria Clara Ramalho, Aristide Barraud, Will Yama, Antonio Castro, Liriz, Nathalia Matos, Cecile Cornet, Baptiste Lignel, Isabela Braz, Nakarte, Joaddan Campos, Pedro Monteiro, Bianca Oliveira, Larissa Santana, Paulo Accioly, Yara Amaral, Igor Augusto, Massime, Arthur Possas, Ana Leal, Alice Becka, Kynne Lima, Christopher Williams e Hugo
The present has long been no more important than the future. Without two kisses, without forró or punch the clock. Everything is far, everyone is far, but the hug soon comes.
Instagram: @krullpedro
Adverbs
UNITED STATES
Director, Director of Photography, Dancers & Choreographers Annie Zeng
Music Courtesy of Youtube Audio Library, Solo Cello Passion by Doug Maxwell
Adverbs explores a range of human emotions as seen through movement and felt by the body. It is a movement tapestry which probes nonverbal communication and which questions the mental and physical health implications of emotional embodiment. Some manners of embodiment serve us well by increasing our presence in a room, our attractiveness, or our vitality. Others give away that our mind is not currently on the task at hand or that we feel small and isolated. Through the power of habit, emotions that we choose to regularly put on shape our minds and bodies in the long-term. Whether the outcome is beneficial or not is left to our awareness and choice.
Iain McGilchrist writes about non-verbal communication in The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World: “Non-verbal behavior, language, facial expression, intonations and gestures are instrumental in establishing complex contradictory, predominantly emotional relations between people and between man and the world. How frequently a touch by the shoulder, a handshake or a look tell more than can be expressed in a long monologue. Not because our speech is not accurate enough. Just the contrary. It is precisely its accuracy and definiteness that make speech unsuited for expressing what is too complex, changeful and ambiguous.”
These are my questions for the community: How do your emotions look and feel on you? Do you wear them well or do you need to cast some aside in your expressive wardrobe? Sometimes your body intuits feelings that have yet to surface in your consciousness. In what ways do you respond and move?
Do you move: delicately, aggressively, anxiously, sloppily, hopelessly, lusciously?
What adverbs do you wear?
Instagram: @aqzeng
The Last Children
FRANCE
Director Fu LE
Director of Photography Alexander Viollet
Choreographer Fu LE
Dance Company Children of the school of Saint-Martin-Labouval
Composer Julien Langlois
The school merging consists in concentrating isolated primary schools in centralized educational institutes. In 2019, 400 French schools are concerned by this reform. The Last Children is a choreographic film made in single-shot with the children of a school on the eve of its closure. Through a metaphorical fable, it bears witness to the achievement of the desertification in the rural world and the death of its villages.
Instagram: @cie.tetrapode
Røtter (Roots)
NORWAY, USA, SPAIN
Director Raven Jackson
Director of Photography Felipe Vara de Rey
Choreographer & Dancer Henrikke Sande Boger
Composer Victor Magro
Sound designer Miguel Calvo
Color grade Hadrien Royo
Speaking through gesture, a dancer falls back into the land she grew from.
Henrikke Sande Boger is a Norwegian performer, choreographer, filmmaker, multimedia artist, director and editor. She received her MFA from Tisch School of The Arts, with a concentration in Dance and Technology, in 2019. Her choreography has been showcased internationally on several Film Festivals in New York, Topanga, Jacksonville, Paris and Romania, through her newest film project “Røtter”. In 2020 Henrikke received support from the Norwegian Arts Council, as an emerging artist.
Director Raven Jackson is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and photographer. She has received support from Cinereach, SFFILM, IFP, Tribeca Film Institute, New Orleans Film Society, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and Westridge Foundation. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, TriQuarterly, CALYX, Kweli, Phantom Limb, PANK, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poetry, little violences, is available from Cutbank Literary Magazine. Raven is a Cave Canem fellow and holds MFAs from New York University’s Graduate Film Program and the New School’s Writing Program.
Cinematographer Felipe Vara de Rey is a Madrid-born, Brooklyn-based cinematographer and director. In May of 2019, Netflix released the original film ‘See You Yesterday’, executive produced by Spike Lee, which Felipe lensed for director Stefon Bristol. ‘Nosotros’ was his feature-length directorial debut.
Instagram: @henrikkesandeboger
Second Seed
UNITED STATES
Director Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt & Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington
Director of Photography Alan Jenson
Choreographer Baye & Asa
Dancers AJ Parr, Myssi Robinson, Marla Phelan, Sam Pratt, Amadi Washington
Composers Jack Grabow
Second Seed is a dance film responding to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s film is an assertion of white cultural and intellectual supremacy and a call to arms against the social/racial restructuring of the United States. This interpretation of America is rooted in delusional white fear, an idea best encapsulated by Griffith’s characterization of a “helpless white minority” unable to protect themselves from black freedom and civic engagement. Our film explores the cult of white-victimhood and its enduring viral effect on American politics and relationships.
Instagram: @bayeandasa
A Special Thanks to Our Partners
