PICKS 1
October 7th @ 7:00PM | Whitsell Auditorium | Run Time: 107minsWe begin this year’s festival with a line-up of 13 films from Canada, the UK, Italy, France, and the US. Many of these films share perspectives on what we are facing, questioning, processing, and healing in our personal and collective bodies. Picks 1 begins on Portland’s own 82nd Avenue and closes on a dusky cliffside with a poem. In between we are shown stories that explore whimsy, repression, human and land, unification, immigration, and coming of age. With almost half of these films as solos, we are reminded of the time of alone-ness we are both coming out of and continuing to be with. We share these stories with respect and a hope that they will remind our audience that to witness someone’s story is an act of together-ness. Picks 1 runs 92 minutes with a 15 minute intermission.
Safe & Seen on 82nd
United States / Oregon Artist
Directors: Dawn Jones Redstone, Annie Tonsiengsom
Choreography: Kiyo
Director of Photography: Dustin Tolman
Edit, additional footage: James Jones
Song “Korekara” : Michelle Fujii and Walter Clarke
Made as part of Unit Souzou’s RHYTHM: Walking to the Heartbeat of Our Community
A cinematic short set to Unit Souzou’s original taiko drum tracks illustrating the struggle of our Asian character to be seen. The struggle is both literal and metaphorical. Literal in that pedestrian safety in Portland’s Jade District, a four-lane busy thoroughfare in Portland, Oregon’s city center where multiple injuries and deaths have occured due to years of neglect and infrastructural racism. Metaphorical as our main character’s transformation depicts the struggle of Black, Indigenous People of Color to be seen. The many forms of racism present in our society presents an unsafe environment in the United States. Our character’s frustration and anger reaches a fever pitch internally to manifest an emotional turning point and determination to remain unseen no longer resulting in joyful release and internal peace.
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Red Line
United States
Director: Irishia Hubbard
Performer: Miché Smith
Choreographer: Irishia Hubbard in collaboration with performer
Camera Operator(s): Tay Lynne, Virginia Boyles, and Loren Degraaff
Lighting Designer: Arin Lynn
Composer: Dylan Romaine
The flight or flight response to trauma in bodily form. Red Line examines the resilience of a Black woman in the face of allostatic load. Her reality is multidimensional, and her existence challenges the redlining of her identity.
Follow the Artists
@irishiahubbard
@mashaysmiff
@tcamillelynne
@virginiaisforlvrs
@loren.degraaff
@rinlynn
@dylanromaine
They Dance With Their Heads
Canada
Director, Animator: Thomas Corriveau
Choreographers: Thomas Corriveau & Marie Mougeolle
Actor: Marc Béland
Dancers: Audrée Juteau, Brice Noeser, Marie Mougeolle, Catherine Tardif, Liane Thériault, Antoine Turmine, Eduardo Ruiz Vergara
Music Composer: Guido Del Fabbro
Sound Design: Olivier Calvert
The severed head of a choreographer is held captive by an eagle on a desert island. With a dazzling mastery of drawing and painting, this animated short unexpectedly takes us into the sensitive world of an artist madly in love with dance.
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I Just Want to Dance
United States
Director: Amanda Beane
Camera: Kristina Willemse
Choreographers/Dancers: Abdiel Jacobsen and Shay Dixon
Editor: Zoë Mountain
When two dancers are asked to partner at an audition each struggle with the flip sides of homophobia before finding common footing. Set in a Victorian ballroom overlooking the San Francisco skyline, the dancers take a journey through genres of partner dancing, addressing homophobia and effeminophobia.
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An Evening With Taglioni
United Kingdom
Directors: Jessica Wright & Morgann Runacre-Temple
Director of Photography: Matthias Pilz
Cast: Alessandra Ferri, Antonia Franceschi, Amancio Gonzalez, Jenny Runacre, Matthew Hawkins, Paul Liburd, Raad Rawi, Raj Ghatak, Saffron Coomber
Composer: Frank Moon
Producer: Elettra Pizzi, Noni Couell, Gerry Maguire, Lise Smith
Editor: Arttu Salmi
Screenwriter: Jeff James
Based on a true story from when legendary ballerina Marie Taglioni, the first woman to go ‘en pointe’, retired. Her pointe shoes were bought by a fan… Then cooked at a lavish dinner party and served to 35 guests.
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Suck It Up
United States
Director: Baye & Asa
Director of Photography: Alan Jensen
Choreographer: Baye & Asa
Performers: Baye & Asa
Sound design: Baye & Asa
AC: Joshua Lawson
Editing: Baye & Asa
Heteronormative advertising campaigns tell men that they are weak, small, balding, and flaccid. These commercial images promise status, offer solutions to inadequacy, and breed entitlement. Men mimic this commercialized masculinity, and act out when they are not rewarded. Internalized deficiency creates a culture of resentment and has led to violence. This film confronts the violent fallout.
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Fresh oranges into the ocean
Italy
Choreography & Direction: Silvia Giordano
Video direction: Nuanda Sheridan
Performers: Eduarda Santos, Noemi Calzavara, Reiko Ohta
Dop & Filmmaker: Sofia Quercetti
Color grading: Sofia Quercetti
Music: Giorgos Gargalas
Text: Silvia Giordano
Editing: Silvia Giordano & Nuanda Sheridan
Production: La Cap | Re-Hub
With the support of Codarts University of the Arts, Fontys Academy of performing arts, Sosta Palmizi, Compagnia degli Istanti, Asinalonga.
While merging and intertwining with nature, three young girls create a metaphorical and visionary narrative of their present condition and their projections towards the future. Through their lightness, disorientation, vitality, and strength, they embark on a choreographic journey facing high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil. Guided by absurd questions the oranges reflect the path of the protagonists in their delicate passage to adulthood and guide us in a poetic reflection on our lives.
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Seers
United States | Oregon Artist
Filmmaker: Robert Uehlin
Choreographer and Performer: Faith Morrison
Seers is a screendance exploring the feeling of a desert ecosystem and the frantic stillness of its inhabitants.
amser / time
UNITED KINGDOM
Director: Deborah Light
Concept and Choreography: Deborah Light, Eddie Ladd, Gwyn Emberton
Director of Photography: Pete Telfer (Culture Colony)
Editor: Pete Telfer (Culture Colony)
Composer and Sound Design: Sion Orgon
Producer: Laura H Drane
Performers: Eddie Ladd, Deborah Light, Jake Nwogu
Drone and Gimbal Operator: Rob Key
Camera Assistants: Lowri Paige, Kieran Shand, Felix Cannadam
Runner: Lucy Wordsworth
Grading: Gorilla
Thanks to Dr. Martin Bates
Supported by Arts Council of Wales, Welsh Government, with thanks to BBC Arts, One Dance UK and Arts Council England
Moving through time along Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay, we arrive at today’s climate crisis.
Sarn Gynfelyn is revealed every low tide and looks like a road into the sea. In fact, it is a glacial moraine laid down 20,000 years ago when ice sheets melted, and it marks the beginning of the global conditions that have enabled human expansion.
At Borth, a 6,000 year old forest flourished for a few thousand years. Submerged by the sea, it has since been re-exposed in recent storms. Sarn Gynfelyn and Borth’s forest are both cited as supporting the Cantre’r Gwaelod legend of lost fertile lands in Cardigan Bay, but the geology tells a different story.
Moving forwards, we arrive at Fairbourne, a seaside town built on saltmarsh and English industrial wealth. It is now set to become the first UK town to be decommissioned due to sea level rise. It will be demolished and returned to salt marsh and will have existed for less than 200 years.
In the intertidal zone, between land and sea, three people move, with arresting visual imagery through these three remarkable sites.
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The Space Between Us
United States
Director/Producer: Gabriel Diamond
Sarah Crowell and Keith Hennessey are both dancers, teachers, and activists in the Bay Area. They have known each other for nearly 30 years. But they’ve never collaborated or connected deeply, until now.
The Space Between Us is a radical experiment in the power of bearing witness, inviting vulnerability, and sharing movement, in a time of social distancing and racial reckoning.
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ba(ME)
United Kingdom
Creative Producer, Project Manager & Co-Director: Cathy Waller
Filmmaker, Director & Editor: Michael Garrett
Co-Director & Dramaturg: Ailin Conant
Performer & Choreographer: Julie Ann Minaai
Choreographic Consultant, Dancer: Yukiko Masui
Composer: Lewis Wright
Featuring Music by: Torben Lars Sylvest
Voice Over Artist: Nigel Pilkington
Behind the Scenes ‘BTS’ Videographer & Editor: Cher Nicolette Ho
BTS Video Composer: Venetia Lim
Photographer: Camilla Greenwell
Film Cast:
Body Actor as Choreographer & Immigration Officer: Alistair Goldsmith
Audition Dancers: Alexander Love, Ella Holappa, Lúcia Salgueiro, Mason Presley, Andrea Vilarrubias, Lesly Avendaño, Tom Pipes, Jule Cecilia Niekamp, Emily Lue-Fong
Mother & Child: Emma Burbidge & Elliot Burbidge
Partners: Arts Council England, The Place, London Contemporary Dance School, Chinese Arts Now, New Earth Theatre, Centre 151, TripSpace, The Motion Dance Collective, Besea.n
Support Team: Gerson Saldanha and Marc Scotter
ba(ME) sheds light on an intertwined journey of being both an immigrant in the UK and a minority artist in the dance industry. The short film explores situational experiences of being a ‘model immigrant / minority’, and adds to a dynamic conversation on immigration and diversity in the arts.
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Am I? I Am.
United States
Director: Samantha Matsumoto
Director of Photography: Ella Lam
Choreographer: Samantha Matsumoto
Dancer: Samantha Matsumoto
Music: “How Deep is the Ocean?” by Paul Whiteman and Jack Fulton
Inspired by the nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” Am I ? I Am dives into the spiraling mind of a person deciphering what is real and what isn’t. Am I here? Am I there? “Life is but a dream” so Am I dreaming?
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What I Know So Far
France
Director & Director of Photography: Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern
Choreography & Performance: Emilie Leriche
Music: 1. Chopin; Nocturne No.2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 Performed by Ján Špoták
Text: Emilie Leriche
Choreographed for GöteborgsOperans Danskompani’s “One on One”
Film production supported by Orsolina28
Special thanks
Katrín Hall, Simony Monteiro, Dan & Christina Ahern, & Ján Špoták
Movement, words, a soliloquy.
A “keeping-track-of” small thoughts and knowledges.
A poem, written as a reminder.