Aimed at promoting contemporary art practices with a focus on performance art, after exhibition 30 Years of Experimental Theatre in 2015, McaM continues exploring the boundaries and possibilities between contemporary theatre and other related fiels. Exhibition On Site Impromptus: Dance and Moving Images in Daily Space centers on “dance film”, an art form emerged at the beginning of last century, in daily spaces and public space. Curated by Tsai Yun-Ting, a researcher of dance film, the exhibition invites Gabriele Brandstette, co-director of the International Research Centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures” and Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, and Sarah Möller, organizer and judge of POOL TanzFilmFestival, as academic consultants; Dr. Wang Jiqing as the advisor of text translation and academic communication. The Exhibition features 31 artists and artist collectives from 18 countries. During the exhibition, museum will also host a series of academic discussions and workshops relevant to dance film, as well as a live project presented jointly by a group of young artist.
Dance and Film
Movement seems to be the crucial common point of the two arts dance and film. Since the early beginnings of cinematography dance is a favourable subject in film as it exemplifies the paradoxical capacity of the new media: the fixation of movement through single moving photographies. Filming dance never remains a pure representation but goes beyond, as the word kinema in its double meaning – not only as movement but also as change – is indicating. The dancing body, captured by the camera eye, will later appear as a transformed other on screen, oscillating between reference and its new cinematic presence. The film inscribes its aesthetics into the choreography and adds own movement material: camera movements, pan shots and zooms, cuts – a possible re-arrangement of the single frames and thus a change of the dance step sequences – animations, fast and slow motion. The art form of dance film – or film-choreography – connects and arranges the represented movements of the dancers and the movements, produced by filmic means in a way that the integral movement of the film itself appear as dance.
The exhibition “On Site Impromptus: Dance and Moving Images in Daily Space” presents an international selection of contemporary dance films, reflecting the rich facets of the art form and the various possibilities of the alliance of dance and film. The exhibited art works exploit a wide range of film-choreographic approaches: digitally multiplied bodies, corporal fragmentations, kaleidoscopic arrangements of body parts – the audience experiences choreographies, whereby the cinematic body transcends the physical conditions, gravity and wholeness, of the pro-filmic dancing body. The visitors will encounter remembering bodies, film-dances between tradition and presence, life and dead, as well as poetic works, whereby language, body and image motion are engaged in a dialogue. Finally several films lead the audience back into everyday spaces and vivid city landscapes, where the dancers take on usual movement patterns in order to ultimately break the ranks.
——Sarah Möller
