Two people dance across the window of a studio in New York, their bodies unperturbed by passersby, creating masterful figures like a live painting. The cacophony of the street meets the pleasure of the inner studio. Over in minutes, the experience is fleeting, yet full of life.
The first Iowa International ScreenDance Festival will captivate viewers at noon Saturday at FilmScene, 118 E. College St.
The ScreenDance festival is part of the larger Iowa Dance Festival taking place in Iowa City on Friday and Saturday, including a variety of events around the city and a closing performance by the Cambrians’ Nexus Project. The ScreenDance fest is the brainchild of UI dance professor Eloy Barragán, the festival’s founder and director, who studied and became certified to bring ScreenDance to the University of Iowa and the community as part of his proposal for the Career Development Award.
“ScreenDance is a genre of dance made exclusively for the camera in which the movement is the central theme of the story and the primary expressive element in the work,” Barragán said. “For me as a choreographer, I think that ScreenDance can give the viewer a different experience from the one they have in a theater.
“With my work in ScreenDance, I want the audience to feel that they are part of the dancing, part of the space, in which they can have an intimate experience. With this, skilled dancers, filmmakers, and choreographers can bring and promote their work to any place and communities in the world through the Internet.”
The response to the call for entries far surpassed expectations, with 98 total representing 25 countries.
Curator Nora Garda, the director of the Iowa Dance Festival, said it will be a blessing for new people to experience this new medium of dance.
“There is really a lot of art produced and a lot of interest in sharing with others,” she said. “People in general don’t have the concept of what ScreenDance is. I think it is something very exciting once you explain to people, it may be only a minute and a half, and the dance has been created just for the camera, that it’s the videotaping of the formats and then editing and taping a really creative piece.”
Garda, a senior chemist at the university who began dancing at 5 years old, said she has been involved with the Iowa Dance Festival since its beginning.
“People come and go, but I continue with this,” she said. “I was thinking about doing this for only 10 years, but now I am excited again. I’m thinking maybe we should continue and keep doing this for 10 more.”
The festival will show 12 films from 10 different countries. Two with backgrounds in dance (Barragán and Gorda) and two in cinema, the four curators for the festival sought to divide and conquer. Having to narrow down to the very best, the criteria for selection included a compelling fusion of dance and film, movement as the central theme and primary language, human and artistic content, and cinematic idea.
“There was not a particular aesthetic or sheen that I was looking for,” said Mike Gibisser, a curator and UI assistant professor of cinema. “I tried to take each film on its own terms and think about how the formal elements of the film built up to support or complicate its thematic elements. For me, the most engrossing moments in the films were those in which the filmmakers utilized camera placement or composition to deviate from a viewpoint that is conventional to an audience/stage dynamic. These were instances … that allowed the viewer to infer the dancer’s movements and consider the off-screen space.”
The festival aims to bring awareness to an exhilarating new perspective that continues to grow in popularity in the general public.
“Though this generation is new to it, to bring screen dance to Iowa City is to bring more eyes to the passion of expressing movement in person as well as on the screen,” Barragán said.
DANCE/FILM
Iowa International ScreenDance Festival
When: Noon Saturday
Where: FilmScene, 118 E. College
Admission: $8