Celebrating new independent short films from around the world.
Inventive and experimental integration of movement, choreography and the moving image on screen.
London International Screen Dance Festival (LISDF) 2021 will feature 26 films from 5 continents, including 4 World Premieres from the USA, South Korea and the UK and 11 UK premieres.
Set up in 2019 London International Screen Dance Festival is a biennial event that celebrates new independent short films from around the world. This dynamic event is a celebration of the inventive and experimental integration of movement, choreography and the moving image on screen.
Over two evenings you can expect a diverse range of films from the international community including experimental works and films bringing movement to life on the big screen.
There will be 4 programmes over 2 days, each programme running for around one hour
Programme 1 & 2 Thursday 23 September
Programme 3 & 4 Friday 24 September
Taking an eight-minute duet situated in various locations and repeated four times, choreographer Claire Marshall investigates how the sense of story shifts with the consideration of location, cinematography and digital editing. The duet features dancers Richard Causer and Lucy Hood as a discordant couple stuck in a rut, looping manipulative behaviour as the four stories converge into one.
Image by Kevin Holloway.
Two people inhabit a surreal, ‘Escherian looking’ room that serves as a container for linguistic clues and gravitational paradoxes.
The notion of space as a fixed system of coordinates is suspended, letting emerge the perspective-dependent relations amongst bodies and objects.
Foldable architecture is given a human dimension: if ‘space’ is a tangle of flexible coordinates, a ‘place’ is where the threads of space tangle with the ones of life, weaving a carpet of human narratives.
Three women – each isolated in their own room. They look within to find strength and use their experiences as women to communicate a hope for the future.
The Knight Errant {Orlando seeks to present an intimate portrait of an eleven-year-old boy engaged in honing his two passions, football and piano, and to show how their contrasting energies work together to create an equilibrium between the physical, mental and creative sides of the human. Created from the perspective of a dance maker seeking to communicate human energy through the shaping of movement, timing, pace, phrasing and dynamic within the frame and integrated sound.
Communications is an experimental film bringing together a drummer and dancer, meeting for the first time, to simply communicate through rhythm, reacting instinctually and interpreting intuitively. Half way through the film the drums fade and we focus on the breathing of the dancer. The idea of the rhythm and movements relating to breath, the inhalation and exhalation thats so core to our being, was unexpected but became central to the film and an idea that Fontanelli is carrying into new photographic and film work.
Hadi’s birthday landed on the 3rd of April, 2020 during lockdown and for the first time he celebrated it all by himself.
Song of Songs is a deeply personal evocation of the erotic prose poem of the same name that appears in the Old Testament. Shot in black and white with an original cello score, it evokes a cinematic space that is contemplative and austere. Song of Songs turns ritual to art to performance; to be enchanted, enveloped and wrapped in the sublime, the imagined and the familiar.
Confined in a room. Where routine becomes infinite habit for the body, space becomes for the soul a gateway to enter, or to exit…
In memory of Marcus White, May 17, 1988 – May 14, 2020
Marcus created this dance film for the 2017 Moving 24 fps, which he co-founded and directed with Carlos Funn. This event brought together choreographers, dancers, filmmakers and editors, with the objective of making a dance film in one weekend in Detroit.
Special thanks to Screen Dance International, Detroit.
In January 2020 we did not know that we were going to spend more than half a year without seeing each other in the same space. “Resilience” is the last video dance work we did in the pre-pandemic times.
In collaboration with “El búho”, an English musician, we explored the complicity, mutual inspiration and trust in the paths of each of the members of the project.
Through the theme of the bather, the artist plays in this movie with the traditional representation of the female nude, freely inspired by the painting «Trois femmes et une petite fille jouant dans l’eau» by Felix Vallotton. By a collaborative approach with women dancers, it is a process of reappropriation of the female body by the movement, where the model becomes full-fledged actor of what she chooses to give
Joowon Song who featured in the 2019 Festival will present the World Premiere of 마후라 Mufffler, part of an ongoing series recording the physical and cultural disappearance of neighbourhood communities to redevelopment.
마후Muffler explores the process of this disappearance and gives meaning to the animation of mechanical, redundant objects. It is based on Jang an-pyeong, an area of Seoul dedicated to Korea’s automobile industry. This area has been known since 1970, for its used car lots and the sale of all types of car and van components. It is a place of deep history for the Korean automobile industry.
Birds is a short digital choreographic piece imagined thought directed by John Degois. With this piece he tries to transpose live performance into film. He thus chooses to make a sequence shot in order to keep the notion of “live”, slow motion to allow the spectator to have time to watch where he wants. He also breaks the perspective by not necessarily centering the main action in the middle of the image. Against a background of melancholy, Birds evokes a time when the question of freedom did not arise.
John Degois’ film Focus was presented at London International Screen Dance Festival 2019.
This Part I Carry is an extended field of poetic thought, movement, and sound that traces a relationship of kinship between the unraveling body and the cycle of bereavement, isolation, and regeneration. Filmed in a former foundry, the film explores the relationship of self and memory to the experience of aging rooted in our own bodies and to the sheer persistence “to survive one’s own departure” (Hannah Arendt).
Love letters in the form of gestures, where the invisible lives, expresses feelings, making the virtual universe a powerful partner to access the sensitiveness. Scenes of a man, a woman, whom carry on loneliness in their bodies, vestiges of dreams in the search for the reunion. An aesthetic experience that transforms virtual space into universal territory where poetic transcendence allows us to contemplate a non-verbal zone. Recorded by dancer´s cell phone during COVID-19 confinement.
#FreeBelarus is a film created in direct response to unprecedented violence that has erupted around Belarus following its deliberately falsified presidential elections in August 2020, in solidarity with the protestors. The peaceful protests were severely suppressed by the riot police. Several people have died, hundreds of people have been injured and tens of thousands have been detained, including oppositional candidates, journalists, reporters. Red and white colors, which are used in the film, are the symbols of the peaceful protests.
Making Men examines the question of masculinity. This dance film zooms in on 4 individuals in the process of becoming men. As is expected, they proceed unquestioningly into manhood through various stages of their lives, adopting the clearly coded characteristics allowed by society.
However, a feeling of unease, in the very depths of their being, oppresses them. They feel uncertainty but also something else, harder to define…
Shot in the landscape of Zimbabwe, the film features strong and rhythmical choreography but also a special camera work that intensifies emotions inspired by the movement.
This year revealed many things. I don’t even know where to start.
Chimera is a short dance film. The character, a sort of Lewis Carroll’s Alice of modern times, evolves in a world where the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred. In front of a mirror, she looks into her past and into herself. The reflection becomes the place where dreams and questions materialize as much as the past we carry within us and the multiple faces that make us who we are
Filmed amidst scorched ruins of the Minneapolis Uprising following the murder of George Floyd, Dastak: Fire is the third movement of a soul- stirring cinematic dance meditation created with Guggenheim Awardee, choreographer Ananya Chatterjea, and her company of fierce, BIPOC women & femmes. Fire traces the knockings of disruptions and injustices on our hearts as dancers respond to the complexities of intersecting pandemics, weaving stories of boundaries and loss, belonging, forgiveness, and love.
The screen is split in two. One side shows a montage of archival film images: three girls fishing at a lake, a zombie chase scene, a woman in the bath. The other side shows the performer in dialog with the images: using various material resources and/or her own body to devise, create, and produce a new soundtrack to accompany them, thus orchestrating the images aurally and bringing them to life.
Supported by Onassis Foundation as part of the 8th Onassis New Choreographers Festival.
We are never getting what we want. We are never happy with what we get. ‘You Wanted Rivers’ is a dance film about desires that wear us down, that make us follow risky paths and that keep us forever thirsty and forever blind.
Body and architecture build frames of memory. Until the end.
Cortège is a meditation on departures, reflecting on both the desire for self-emancipation and the weight we carry from those no longer with us. Accompanied by a powerful arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s Pavane Pour Une Infant Défunte, Cortège follows eleven performers who ascend the stunning interior of architect Zaha Hadid’s famous Havenhuis. Collaboratively choreographed by the performers and directed by Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern, Cortège is a pondering of aesthetic and a contemplation on separation.
Screendance in collaboration with Katie Huang and Samantha Lin exploring duality, transcontinental passage, and fragmented identities. Self-reflection in questioning pluralistic panethnicity comes through the visual, movement, and sonic landscape. Digital.
Set in the urban metropolis of London, Toke, is an intimate portrait of Danish-born dancer Toke Broni Strandby. Director NONO -Nono Ayuso- expertly visualizes the emotionally layered journey we endure to fulfill our dreams while exploring themes of identity, contemporary alienation, and acceptance. An inspiring story about triumph, Toke, is a celebration of the beautiful resilience of the human spirit.
Birds is a short digital choreographic piece imagined thought directed by John Degois. With this piece he tries to transpose live performance into film. He thus chooses to make a sequence shot in order to keep the notion of “live”, slow motion to allow the spectator to have time to watch where he wants. He also breaks the perspective by not necessarily centering the main action in the middle of the image. Against a background of melancholy, Birds evokes a time when the question of freedom did not arise.
John Degois’ film Focus was presented at London International Screen Dance Festival 2019.
