Excert from my paper!

I learnt a lot about the right and wrong way to infuse film and dance, some of the film-dance pieces just really didn’t work, they would have been great as two separate things but there needs to be that connection between stage and screen, and some of the earlier ‘number’s’ really didn’t have that connection, and some were just a little bit boring. The first number, ‘Runner’s World’ Choreographer: Anne Firmender, Filmmaker: Dylan Patterson, unfortunately really didn’t give me much hope for the rest of the programme, and therefore it stood out to me. The film was simply of a man in his ‘running gear,’ on a green screen jogging, as the background behind him changed, the dance was then based on this same idea of dancers in their, ‘running gear’ using movements clearly inspired by a race or people jogging. It was pretty boring and ineffective, obviously there was a connection between stage and screen but the screen was so simple you needed to look at the dancers, the 6 girls running across the stage perhaps with various leaps thrown in. It was just very simple and uninventive. This automatically lowered my expectations for the rest of the piece, “simple films with simple movements,” but I was wrong the films and dance just got better from that point forward with interaction between screen and dancers, correlation between colors and lines of dancers, as well as a narrative that ran both on screen and live in the theatre, which although a little dramatic was really great and was what I had expected.
The dance and film that really grabbed my attention was ‘Confusion’ Choreographer: Jennifer Raine Kostel, Filmmaker: Matt Maloy was brilliant. Both the dance and film were superb separately and so when put together they created new meaning that wouldn’t have been seen alone. The Dance was a solo performed by the choreographer; the film was set through a forest as the subject- a women who looked very similar to the dancer herself- took photographs of wildlife and the surrounding areas. The dance was a very powerful contemporary piece, the choreography mimicked the images on screen, and the positioning was perfect. At times the emotion on screen opposed the emotion of the dancer, which worked perfectly as it gave a new depth to the film, as an image of the women smiling and laughing came on screen, the dancer would rock and move to a lower consoling position giving a sense of lost to the film, which would otherwise have not been there. The piece was beautiful, full of hidden meaning, and inspiring, I would love to create an installation with that much depth sometime in the future, I feel that to do that I must show a connection between what’s on screen and the dance, not obvious but hidden, and give the audience that moment to see that connection and understand what it is trying to show.