Translation on Air
A monthly rubric, dedicated on short screen dance films
The pitfalls of identity
Identity has become a dividing line in contemporary political discourse and an important element in geopolitical doctrines on both sides of a new ideological conflict. The human body is at the…
What the body doesn’t know it knows
Drawing from Asian-Pacific heritage, mythology and religion, the dance movie TAIAO unfolds in a flat dramaturgy with a female body taking central stage in a series of black-and-white vignettes. This…
Dance and animation: synergy without borders
– A short from BOOKANIMA: Dance directed by Sean Kim BOOKANIMA: Dance is a short dance animated film by Sean Kim. Because of its original approach – ‘bringing to…
On the self-sufficiency of a movement
“A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the…
Black bodies under a white gaze
Structured in three dance chapters, intercepted by a documentary style confessional monologue, Making Men is about (the crisis of) masculinity. Four black men from the Brussels-based company Dunia…
The man and the crowd in a screendance provocation
Man has no nature, only history – these words of José Ortega-y-Gasset can fall heavily on the mind and senses of the viewer, as the first frames of MASS sweep in through the eyes, reaching the…
Mass – screendance “rapids’’?
Humans have no nature, only history” – José Ortega y Gasset – A shot from Mass with director and choreographer Fu Li The 10-minute screendance film by French director and…
Circumstance 2020: moments of history in dance for screen
For more than two years now, we, the humans all across the planet, have been living in times and circumstances of a pandemic. Covid-19 emerged and began to alternate desperate waves of morbidity and…
Burden halved – backpacks filled with inner universes
The viewer’s eye travels along the lines and traverses the objects. Their outer walls. The huge hollow mass. Looking for an entrance through the cracks. Exploring the human body. The muscles and the…
To dance away the burden of being
Time is the pure (a priori) form of inner sense, i.e., our awareness of our own inner mental states. Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general. – Kant, Critique of…
Lazarus: gestures of a non-poetic death and more questions about the representation of women
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. – Sylvia Plath Still from Lazarus, concept and performance Tuixen Benet A room with a wardrobe. The…
Left alone to ourselves
Art serves man to rise and ascend spiritually above himself, to use what we call spiritual will. – Andrei Tarkovsky – A shot from Intertidal.Barene produced by Collettivo…
Maya Wuytack’s Beyond the Body: A Visual Exercise in Corporeal Mythmaking
As someone whose most aesthetically impressionable age coincided with the early 00s, I was schooled in the poeticality of close-up images of the human body through the MTV channel. Two instances of…
The lagoon: human and nature in choreographed structures
A sunset in a mirror; purple, black, orange – soft colours; movement – symmetrical human limbs. A small organism, a small living being. Water. Sand. Purple vegetation. Trembling water.…
The freedom to be yourself and the right to live in dignity
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. – From the “UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS” A shot from…
Waiting for Color – gravitational and driving forces
Dance, cinema, screendance, activism – one of the unifying characteristics between these concepts is often the movement. We may say that these are arts and forms of movement, or at least forms…
Bodies, cities and moving Barcelona
The black-and-white short Moving Barcelona is the eighth film in London-based director Jevan Chowdhury’s series Moving Cities – dedicated to exploring cities in motion. The concept of the film…
Depths – the context of the body and the life of the camera in the depths
In the conversation about contemporary art, screendance intrigues more and more artists and researchers, accumulating intellectual and experimental tools and giving more and more arguments for its…
For the poetry of a movement
Universal, beautiful, quiet, ordinary, communal, stripped down, inviting, multiplying, different, close, meditative, soothing, focused, mesmerising, connecting, loving, tender, caring, fragile, here…
The moving atmosphere in heights and depths
All we know of ourselves is just a certain little surface and there is a whole under-earth of complexity to us that, by definition, keeps out of our sight. It is actually absent to us. It comes…
Halfway between screendance and video art, between self and world – Positive Negativity
Thanks to our online conversation with choreographer and artist Iskra Ivanova in the virtual section of the Translation on Air rubric, we learned how significant her environment of artistic…
Corpus – the beginning of all beginnings
Bodies don’t take place in discourse or in matter. They don’t inhabit ‘’mind’’ nor ‘’body’’. They take place at the limit, qua limit: limit – external border, the fracture and intersection of…