Author: videodansedubreuil

Thank you to everyone who submitted work for the 2011 festival.  Submissions are now closed.  We received over 200 submissions from more than 25 different countries. We will continue to accept mailed submissions that are postmarked December 1.  The program selection will be e-mailed to all artists in January 2011.  Best of luck to all, we look forward to a great festival in April 2011!

Merci à tous ceux qui nous ont envoyé leurs propositions de projets pour le festival 2011. L’appel à candidatures est maintenant clos. Nous avons reçu plus de 200 candidatures provenant de plus de 25 pays. Nous continuerons à accepter les candidatures envoyées par voie postale jusqu’au 1er décembre (le cachet de la poste faisant foi). La sélection du programme sera envoyée par courriel à tous les artistes courant janvier 2011. Bonne continuation à tous, dans l’attente d’un beau festival au mois d’avril 2011 !

The International Video Dance Festival of Burgundy is pleased to announce that its French video dance program will be screened at Dance Camera Istanbul in November: http://www.dancecamera-istanbul.org/program-takvim.html

Le Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne est heureux d’annoncer que son programme de vidéo danse française sera projeté au Festival Dance Camera Istanbul en novembre: http://www.dancecamera-istanbul.org/program-takvim.html

The International Video Dance Festival of Burgundy is pleased to announce that it is now accepting submissions for its third season in 2011.  Please visit the “Candidatures/Submit” page listed at the top of the page.

Le Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne est heureux d’annoncer son nouvel appel à candidatures pour sa troisième édition en 2011.  Merci de consulter la rubrique “Candidatures/Submit” au sommet de cette page.

We are pleased to announce that the festival has been invited to present a selection of French video dance at Wallpaper Dance 2010, a festival/exhibition of video dance in Trieste, Italy organized by the cultural association COREOFFICINA.  The exhibition runs August 23-September 11 at at the Sala Arturo Fittke (opening hours are 10 a.m.-1 p.m. & 5 p.m.-8 p.m.) and live screenings will be held in open air at the Palazzo Gallati September 4-5 at 8:30 p.m.

For more information, please visit their website:  http://www.coreofficina.org/wallpaperdance

Nous sommes très heureux d’annoncer que le festival a été invité à présenter une sélection de vidéo danse française à Wallpaper Dance 2010, un festival/exposition de vidéo danse à Trieste en Italie, organisé par l’association culturelle COREOFFICINA.  L’exposition se déroule du 23 août au 11 septembre à la Sala Arturo Fittke (ouvert entre 10h-13h & 17h-18h) et les projections se tiendront en plein air à la Palazzo Gallati les 4 et 5 septembre à 20h30.

Pour en savoir plus, visitez leur site internet: http://www.coreofficina.org/wallpaperdance

Featured as part of the 2010 festival’s dance photography/video dance exhibition, “Body Traces”, a video dance installation created by Lisa Parra & Sophie Kahn, will be on display at the Centre François Mitterrand in Le Breuil through the end of May. Festival co-director Marisa C. Hayes recently interviewed the two artists on their collaborative work with dance and technology funded by EMPAC’s ( The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) Dance Movies Commission.:

How did the concept of “Body Traces” develop? Was it an idea that had been inspired prior to the EMPAC commission you received to create it?

The concept for “Body/Traces” was developed prior to our EMPAC commission. Sophie and I met in 2007, about a year prior to the commission and residency. We had attended a photography workshop together in NYC and became interested in each others’ work. Sophie had already been using a process to scan her own body and her images inspired me. The idea of scanning a moving body intrigued me because it offered a new perspective, one that might alter the idea of physical presence and body image.

The concept of traces or what movement and the body leave behind is a very interesting topic, particularly in dance. Movement in live performance is ephemeral of course, but even in video dance, choreography often passes by quickly as movement is often captured on camera in a fleeting chain of events. The imagery in “Body/Traces” however, allows us to linger, to study an imprint of the body and its extended movement, or the after-effects. Can you tell us a little about your ideas related to traces?

The “traces” in Body/Traces are manifested in the dialogue that is created with movement, imagery and perception. The idea was to make a space where images become alive while, at the same time, showing what was alive as idle in a kind of interplay between presence and disappearance of the human form. The movement was captured in a stop-motion style, so in reality the choreography consists of halted movement, going against what might be regarded as a natural type of composition of motion. Interestingly enough, this process allows one to consider the traces left by the dancers, the aforementioned “after-effects” of the body through space and time.

Another question that comes to mind in relation to traces, and in particular the imagery used in your installation is that we often approach freezing a moment or slowing it down, for example in dance photography, as a way to illuminate some truth about the body or the movement, but in fact, in “Body/Traces” the dance is often fragmented or fractured. These traces are capable of altering reality, taken outside of their context of a progressive movement sequence and it changes the depiction of the dance and the dancer. Could you comment on how your installation alters perception of movement, imagery and sequential events?

From the start, fragmentation was inherent to the work. Since we were unable to scan the body in real-time, Sophie had to scan the movement sequences in stop-motion at a frame rate of 6 frames per second. This frame rate represents a dramatic reduction, and as a result, the qualities of the movement changed as the sequences progressed. The process became very difficult for the dancer and for Sophie because sustaining the positions and pausing constantly to scan and process the images proved to be very strenuous. Degradation of the movement was inevitable during the process of capturing it. From the point of view of choreography, I found this particular aspect both difficult and interesting. For example, as I was being scanned I found it extremely challenging to keep track of the movement sequence as it progressed. Having to pause and hold a position caused my train of thought to break: I would “lose my place” in the movement, which required me to have to be in a constant mode of “recuperation”. In the end, my movements were no longer what they originally were. In fact, the original movement sequence was broken up into more than 1000 images. The final video is a reconstruction, or an abstraction, of the original movement using these images. The act of breaking up movement obviously alters our perception of its original shape and space, of its patterns and flow, yet I think that it is sometimes necessary to fragment what is familiar to us in order to be more aware that our movement, no matter how habitually fluid we think it may be, is in reality something that is always changing its pattern. Body/Traces tries to underscore that an essential part of movement is disruption, and that this disruption is natural.

Our readers might be very interested to know about the techniques used to create this installation. Could you tell us about the programs you used and how you decided to use them? Had you worked with such programs in the past? If yes, was this your first time merging dance and this imaging process?

Our process utilized a do-it-yourself 3D laser scanner to capture images. These were then processed and rendered in 3D Studio Max software. The scanning apparatus was designed by Sophie and engineer David Barrett, using off the shelf and inexpensive materials such as a webcam and a red line laser. Body/Traces used a readily available system for 3D imaging called DAVID Laser scanner software, requiring only a sweeping laser light and the image from the webcam. As the laser scans the scene, the beam is bent into a line that traces the depth of the object being scanned. The camera monitors this distortion and the software builds a 3D model from the shape of the beam over time. Using this method, each 3D frame can take one to two minutes to capture. More than a thousand images were acquired in this way. Lisa then took rendered 2D images and reconstructed the choreography by animating the image sequences in Final Cut Pro to create the final video. I had used Final Cut previously, but only as an editing tool. This was the first time I used it for the animation of still images.

For the dancer (Lisa Parra), how were the movements created for this project? How did working in this context alter your sense of choreography and movement representation?

At the beginning of this project, I had to move to Madrid, Spain with my husband for work reasons, and so, Sophie and I created most of the work remotely. In the early stages of this project, my understanding of the scanning process was still abstract, so while in Madrid I worked alone attempting to understand this idea of 3D scanning all the while questioning– how do I relate to being scanned in 3D, how does this effect my body and movement? I began with documenting myself weekly in a studio. I would improvise implementing space, and space harmony concepts, actions/reactions, function/expression, out/inner, etc. The documentation was both with video and photographs. After several months of documenting I looked back at the movement and looked for patterns, sequences, fragments of movement that were interesting and began to piece together the movement composition. Then when Sophie was ready to scan I would send her video clips of the movement compositions. She would then have Tina Vasquez (my dancer in NY) look at the video to learn the movement compositions for scanning. Since the scanning process was so laborious for the dancer, Tina would choose excerpts of the movement compositions and it was at this point that the decomposition, and deconstruction of the movement began and would continue through out. The photographs were also an important part of the creative movement process. Taking photographs was another way for me to look at the body and movement. So, I had another dancer of mine, Roze van Berkel take a segment of the movement sequences and repeat it continuously in site specific locations– focusing on the lighting of each environment. As Roze did the sequences over and over I would photograph her taking pictures consecutively. The camera was a 35mm manual film camera. These photographs were fragments of the movement and body. I used these photographs to piece together the narrative of piece.

Prior to working with Sophie on this project, my ideas and experiences about choreography and movement representation were based on the concepts of concert dance works with theme and variation. However, I had also studied ritual dance and dance therapy, along with Laban movement analysis, so, dance for me as a whole has many layers, and in my choreography I have always used variations and combinations of these choreographic concepts and theories. As a whole the experience of creating this work has changed my process and my view of movement and body. Specifically, in the process of documenting my choreographic work—whether by annotation, sound recording, photography, video or 3D scanning—has become in some respects indistinguishable from the work itself. That is, what has been referred to as “left-overs” of my creative process have emerged onto the plane of primary focus. A common theme in my work has been the body and its representation. The images, the videos, the scans I have made while exploring this theme have become a narrative of the theme in their own right. In a sense, attention shifts from the result to the process as result.

For both Sophie and Lisa, what are you currently working on?

We have begun working on a new work called Shift. This work is a follow-up to Body/Traces in that we will be experimenting with real-time 3D scanning process that is currently being developed by new media artist Kyle McDonald. Kyle has been developing this process called “structured light scanning” through openFrameworks, an open source platform. This project will be a live dance performance installation. We have received a residency at Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve in Faro, Portugal and it was also selected to participate at last years Helloworld! workshop for development at Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain (http://wiki.medialab-prado.es/index.php/Shift).

The dance film “Jackie & Judy” (Phil Harder, Andrea Lerner & Rosane Chamecki) has already been shown at L’ARC -the National Theater and  Crédit Agricole.  Friday May 7th, it will be screened as part of the 2010 festival’s official selection.  Below, paste the link to watch a short video featuring the film’s directorial and editing team:

http://www.dancefilmsassn.org/mov_Phil%20And%20Pat2.html

In addition, festival co-director Marisa C. Hayes asked Phil Harder to comment on the film’s origins, its relationship to Norm McLaren’s “Pas de Deux” (to which the film pays homage).  Below is his account of how the project was born:

The film Jackie & Judy is a combination of an early dance piece by Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner (chameckilerner) updated with an echo effect over the choreography. The choreographers and I were discussing another film we were about to shoot. We thought it would be interesting to shoot a second film that experiments with choreography through post effects. I was an early fan of Jackie & Judy. It was like a nostalgic hit song to me. Rosane and Andrea had performed this piece countless times and weren’t as interested in revisiting a dance they did years ago. We decided that an update through post effects would be a challenging experiment to try to create a new version of an older dance.

As with many of chameckilerner film projects, our brainstorming sessions usually take place at the bar, in this case it was a small New York pub on Thompkins Square Park. After we sparked the idea, Andrea and Rosane were on the side walk rehearsing. Jackie & Judy was ingrained in their heads. They remembered every move. Our shoot was in a day so we had to come up with something fast. I mentioned Norman McLaren’s “Pas de Deux” as an influence or an ode to layer over the choreography. We already had a studio but no set. With very little prep time I knew a black curtain and back light was all we needed to capture the base layer of the dance. The idea was not only to document the piece but to turn Jackie & Judy into an abstract visual- hopefully something new would come from the concoction. We thought the rapid speed of Jackie & Judy would be a great way to experiment with McLaren’s technique.
I have an archive of 16mm films. Norman McLaren’s films take up a large section in my collection. Of course there’s Pas De Deux, but also many of his scratched film experiments and the feature documentary from 1970 “The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees”. In the film McLaren revisits the techniques he used to create many of his animations. His visuals stand up to the test of time and his range is amazing- from the hand made quality of painting on film to the elegance of Pas de Deux with exotic optically printed echoes that bring visual magic to the duet.

Filming dance makes me appreciate early motion picture, when filmmakers were trying to discover the medium. They shot things that moved: trains, horses, automobiles. The same holds true for dance. It’s all about capturing the rhythm of movement. With the echo effects I wanted to use a film technique that creates something that choreography can’t do alone.

Jackie & Judy was shot with several angles, from wide shots to extreme details. At the end the dancers throw themselves on the floor in a free form explosion of energy- the grand finale. This ending is meant to be done only once live. For filming, the dancers had to slam their bodies on the floor again and again as I captured various angles. Andrea and Rosane were bruised and beat up after the shoot- I think they said “this better be worth it”. The idea of the ending was to build the echoes more and more until they engulf the dance. The hope was to gradually lose the dance and enter complete abstraction for a new piece of choreography.

In post, editor Patrick Pierson and I felt it was essential to keep the original dance intact. The echo layers are very tempting to overdo, and it could be easy to lose sight of the choreography. Patrick Pierson edited the dance before echo layers were added and we received Rosane and Andrea’s suggestions and approval. We used franticdrums and bass from The Chicago Underground Trio as a jazzy, energetic beat to pace the edit.

We added the effects digitally, (basically a similar technique used by McLaren, now updated with modern tools). The original dance is given contrast, reducing the film image to slices of rim light. The echoes create abstract outlines of motion that follow the dancers. The layers become part of the dance, not a trail or a back layer. As the dance builds we lose the original dancers in exotic kaleidoscopes of moving outlines.

It is interesting to bend choreography through film effects. We can freeze a move and let the echoes catch up. We can add just one echo as if each dancer has a partner. We can increase echoes or space echoes at different rates. It’s amazing to edit this way. As a filmmaker I get to dabble in choreography via the effects. We also updated McLaren’s technique with three dimensional pushes through the echoes, something McLaren could not do with 1960’s optical technology. Through digital post we pushed into the layers, into the image as if the echoes were moving toward and past the lens. We used this technique to end the film as Andrea and Rosane threw themselves on the floor over and over. Our hope was to throw the viewer into an abstraction of moving lines and designs. I think the feeling the viewer gets is an exotic, high energy dance that can only be witnessed through film. It is our hope that chameckilerner dance films create a new chapter for their choreography. These films can go beyond the dance community to reach an audience of film lovers.

[English below] Merci à tous les artistes et spectateurs qui sont venus nous rejoindre pour l’ouverture du festival à la Médiathèque du Creusot. Certains sont venus de loin, du Vietnâm, des Etats-Unis… pour être avec nous. Nous avons également saisi cette occassion pour présenter à M. François Renard-directeur du Crédit Agricole du Creusot, un trophée pour le soutien que lui et ses agences au Creusout nous ont apporté depuis l’origine du festival. Merci également à Gerald Herman (directeur du film “Rêve à Hanoi”), Cao Chi Thanh & Pham Ngoc Thanh (danseurs dans le film) et à Madame Lê (traductrice franco-vietnamienne).

Venez nous voir la semaine prochaine à l’ARC, Scène Nationale du Creusot pour une soirée de vidéo danse et de spectacles vivants.

Thank you to the artists and audience members who joined us for the opening of the festival at the Médiathèque of Le Creusot. Some traveled far (from Vietnam, the US) to be with us. We also took advantage of this moment to present François Renard, director of Crédit Agricole Bank of Le Creusot with an award in appreciation of his support for the festival since its very first year. Thank you also to Gerald Herman (director of the film “Dream in Hanoi”), Cao Chi Thanh & Pham Ngoc Thanh (dancers in the film) & Ms. Lê (Franco-Vietnamese translator).

Join us next week at L’ARC, National Theater for an evening of video dance and live performances.

Reminder: The festival begins tomorrow! Saturday April 24, Médiathèque of Le Creusot
Programs at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. & 3 p.m. (For details click “Festival 2010” at the top of the page). See you there!

Rappel: Le festival commence demain ! Samedi 24 avril à la Médiathèque du Creusot
Programmes à 10h, 14h & 15h (plus d’informations en haut sous la rubrique “Festival 2010”). A bientôt !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyJaujKtjg

[scroll down for English] Le Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne est heureux d’annoncer la venue de trois artistes du Vietnâm lors de sa deuxième édition en 2010: Cao Chi Thanh – danseur étoile du Ballet National de l’Opéra du Vietnâm, Pham Ngoc Thanh- jeune étudiant à l’école du ballet de l’opéra de Hanoi et Gerald Herman- le directeur et fondateur de la Cinémathèque de Hanoi.  Herman a réalise le film “Rêve à Hanoi” et sera présent avec les deux danseurs qui jouent dans ce film afin de parler de “Rêve à Hanoi”, de la danse au Vietnâm et d’autres choses plus encore…

Cao Chi Thanh est déjà connu en Europe: il a été artiste invité au sein de l’Opéra de Suède, ainsi qu’au Festival de Danse de Prague. A Helsinki, il a gagné le prix Kirsti Pakkaanen en 2005 au Concours International de Ballet. Toutefois, malgré les invitations d’une nature plus permanente de la part de diverses compagnies internationales, c’est en Asie, dans sa ville natale de Hanoi, que cet artiste préfère demeurer.  Ses rôles sont divers : il danse tous les classiques, de Don Quixote à La Slyphide, en passant par Giselle… mais il travaille également avec les chorégraphes contemporains de Hong Kong, de Taiwan et du Vietnâm, afin d’interpréter de nouveaux ballets.  Lors du Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne, Cao Chi Thanh et Pham Ngoc Thanh animeront une discussion suite au film de danse “Rêve à Hanoi”, consacrée à la danse au Vietnâm, au Ballet National de l’Opéra du Vietnâm et à son école.

OU ET QUAND: samedi 24 avril à 10h à la Médiathèque du Creusot

[ENGLISH] The International Video Dance Festival of Burgundy is pleased to announce the visit of three artists from Vietnam during the 2010 festival: Gerald Herman- director and founder of the Hanoi Cinematheque, Cao Chi Thanh- principal dancer with the Vietnam National Opera Ballet and Pham Ngoc Thanh-student at the National Opera Ballet School.  Herman, director of “Dream in Hanoi” and the dancers who starred in the film, will be present to speak about the film, ballet in Vietnam and more.

Cao Chi Thanh is already known to European audiences for his guest appearances in Sweden and at the Prague International Dance Festival.  In Helsinki he was awarded the Kirsti Pakkaanen prize at the International Ballet Competition.  Despite a range of international invitations, Cao Chi Thanh prefers to remain based in Hanoi.  His roles are diverse, including all the classics: Don Quixote, Giselle, La Sylphide, etc., but he also works with living choreographers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam. During the festival screening of “Dream in Hanoi”, Cao Chi Thanh and Pham Ngoc Thanh will be on hand to discuss dance in Vietnam, the Vietnam National Opera Ballet and its school.

WHERE & WHEN: Saturday, April 24th, 10 a.m. at the Médaithèque of Le Creusot