The Dance on Camera Festival is the world’s longest-running dance film festival. It’s produced by the Dance Films Association and Film at Lincoln Center.
48th Dance on Camera Festival 2020
The 48th Dance on Camera Festival is online at filmlinc.org Friday-Monday July 17-20, 2020. We will miss the cinema, but at least we can be sure of getting a seat.
#mydancefilm
You can even get your own dance film into the festival. The #mydancefilm program on the festival’s closing day will feature two-minute films selected from social media.
For the age of social distancing, the theme is “Isolation.” Every dancer we know is suffering because we live to move, we live to touch and be touched, we live to connect with an audience.
To be considered through June 17, hashtag your original two-minute film with #mydancefilm and #docf17thru20july and tag it with @dancefilms.
Maguy Marin: Time to Act
The opening night French documentary focuses on renowned French choreographer Maguy Marin. Marin is best known for “May B,” her 1981 piece that flipped over traditional concepts of beauty and went political. The film will be followed by a prerecorded Q&A with Marin and director David Mambouch moderated by Liz Wolff, the festival co-curator.
Program 1 Opening Night
Friday, July 17, 2020 at 6:30pm
French & English with Hebrew subtitles
U.S. only
Being
Pablo Destito and Agustina Videla’s Argentine short taps into the restorative power of natural beauty and how dancers respond to it. It’s screening with “Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker.”
Program 3
Saturday, July 18, 2020 at 2pm
American Premiere
Kemp. My best dance is yet to come
English director and performance artist Lindsey Kemp was many a dancer’s muse. He directed David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and worked both on Broadway and London’s West End. Director Edoardo Gabbriellini follows Kemp’s last years in Livorno, Italy.
Program 6
Sunday, July 19, 2020 at 12pm
North American Premiere
English with Italian subtitles
Uprooted – The Journey of Jazz Dance
This is English director and producer Khadifa Wong’s 2019 story of jazz dance. She works the theme of the appropriation of Black culture. It’s true and terribly ironic how White people (sorry Mom) demonize everything Black (sorry Dad), yet copy it and make money from it. We’ve learned that if you like something White, find the Black root and it will be even better.
The still from the movie speaks volumes. If you want to be with one of these dancers, who do you want to be with? I want to be with the dancer in the middle. She has good style and projection. She engages you directly and openly with joy. The dancer on our right has her hip popped out in a sensual expression. The dancer on our left is trying to copy, but she doesn’t have the style or the projection. For the good stuff, dig into the roots. The taproot of U.S. American popular culture is African.
Jazz is Creole (French-African) from New Orleans, but the story of jazz is a journey from West and Central Africa through the Caribbean to New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago and New York City.
African dance is both an expression of belonging to a community and one’s individuality within that community. We get down, not just because we’re human, but because the earth is sacred.
Jazz is the first U.S. American urban music. It is also the most perfect expression of democracy ever developed. You don’t have to join in, but if you do, you are expected both to play along with the theme and when it’s your turn, to show some of your own stuff within the theme.
What happened in Africa and the Caribbean is still happening today in the United States. That’s why Black Lives Matter. But we learned to turn sorrow into joy, and everybody wants some of that.
Understanding the roots makes you appreciate our own African-American culture all the more. Blues, country, jazz, swing, rock, salsa, hip-hop, reggaeton, and Latin trap are one line that begins in West and Central Africa.
Broadway dancing fits in there too. The first U.S. theatre that the entire country knew was African theatre.
The African root keeps folding back in and popping up somewhere else. The journey is the road (if you what I mean). Everywhere we go, our footprints turn into the most beautiful flowers.
Program 9
Sunday, July 19, 2020 at 7pm
World Premiere
U.S. only
