I recently returned from this wonderful event, Ireland’s inaugural Festival of Screendance.
It was another of many highlights in this busy year of travel and performances. Congratulations to curators Mary Wycherley and Jürgen Simpson, and Dance Limerick’s Jenny Traynor and Lisa Hallinan for such a rich and smooth running program. I was involved in the three components of the event: attending the Screendance Lab facilitated by Doug Rosenberg, Katrina McPherson, Simon Fildes and Jürgen Simpson; presenting a performed paper Improcinemaniac in the Symposium; and the screening of my latest screendance Red Rattler in the Festival Installations.
It was great to finally meet some of the screendance artists whose work I have admired from afar, to reconnect with those I continue to admire, and to meet some new artists whose work and words are rich, articulate and visceral.
My Faves:
Installations: Distant Wars (Becky Edmunds); Soliloquy (Saffy Setohy); Terrainskin (Mairead Vaughan & Dara O’Brien); Take Me to Bed (Luke Pell & Jo Verrent)
Screendances: The Time it Takes (Simon Fildes & Katrina McPherson, UK); Vanishing Points (Marites Carino, Canada); Momentum (Boris Seewald, Germany); May and June (Rachel Lincoln, USA); Sight Reading (Lucy Cash, UK); Nation for Two (Chaja Hertog, Nir Nadler, Netherlands); Me—Story of a performance (Jopsu Ramu, Finland/Japan/Estonia); Edits Film (Marisa Zanotti, UK, documentary); Motion Sickness (Jessica Kennedy & John McIlduff, Ireland); Off Ground (Boudewijn Koole, Netherlands); All This Can Happen (David Hinton & Siobhan Davies, UK)
and the repeat viewings of the documentaries Here Now with Sally Gross by Douglas Rosenberg (I previewed at Summerwork in Wisconsin earlier this year) and Håstdans på Hovdala (David Fishel, USA/Sweden) which I saw at this year’s ADF International Screendance Festival.
Speakers: Douglas Rosenberg—Keynote Address; Francis Hubbard—Privileging embodied experience in feminist screendance; Sylvie Vitagaloine—New materials-landscape and the screendance body; Marisa Zanotti—Thinking the body of a film.