Cinema gets in the groove

Continuing its ambitious project to highlight the crossbred offsprings of cinema and other art forms such as sound and theater that started last year, POP Cinema (國民戲院) kicks off its highly anticipated new film series with Moving Shadow-Dance Film Festival. This festival captures the mind, body and soul of the leading figures in contemporary dance scene in 37 rarely seen cinematic works.

For curator Wang Pai-chang (王派章), the program is a departure from documentaries on dance and a break from the customary practices when cinema and dance meet and the camera becomes a dancer rather than an observer and the dancer alters existing perceptions on bodily movements through filmic reflections.

"Unlike painters and musicians who use the body to create art, the cinema is without a corporeal form. Yet through filming and studying the body, the cinema morphs into the image with a body that can think and feel," said Wang.

Freely adapted from the choreography of Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin, The Moebius Strip is a fascinating example of the crossover between cinema and contemporary dance. Breaking the dance norms that include certain postures and a sense of balance, the performers overlap, cross, follow, step and hold onto each other's body to create a mosaic of human sculptures in relation to space. Such a strange spatial presentation of the body forces the camera to follow and dissect the fluid choreography in a participatory way.

A cinematic adaptation of Belgium choreographer Wim Vandekeybus' Blush, which was performed in Taiwan in 2003, is seen in the award-winning film of the same name. This illustrates how a dance piece can be adapted to the cinema to create completely different visual and visceral experiences. Jan Lauwers, also a leading figure in Belgium's theater and dance scene, will screen his feature debut, Goldfish Game.

Other featured films let the artists themselves speak for their creations. Dance Notes is the first film to examine the work of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, showing audiences the dialectical exchange between the creative ideas of choreographer and composer.

"Unlike the modern dance that carries with it a sense of content, contemporary choreography explores new vocabularies and forms. Through Dance Note, the viewer can learn to (re)think the contemporary dance in a non-modern light and understand what it is and is not," Wang said.

Similarly, Lucinada Childs is the first filmed portrait of Childs, a major choreographer and mastermind behind Bob Wilson's groundbreaking Einstein on the Beach with music by Philip Glass. Revealing the choreographer's intellectual adventures through her own words and those of her artist friends, the film does a remarkable job of marking the total emancipation of the body born out of the meticulous control over the body in the work of Childs, who in the eyes of Wang is the only existing choreographer able to work with the highly structured music of Glass.