Samantha Shay's Short Film ROMANCE to Screen At The Moovy Dance Film Festival

On Sunday, March 17, 2024 at 5:30pm, Samantha Shay's short film Romance will screen as part of the Moovy Dance Film Festival at Film at Filmforum, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. The screening will be a part of the Encounters programming block. 

Based on Miranda July's short story "It was Romance," Romance creates an illuminating meeting point between the works of July and Pina Bausch. Resulting from filmmaker Samantha Shay's Fulbright Scholarship at Tanztheater Wuppertal. Created in collaboration with one of the company's youngest and first transgender dancer, Romance centers around how Naomi Brito's transition was inspired by her encounter with the roles of women, as she observed them, in the repertory of Pina Bausch. Set in an auditorium on a Saturday morning, a group of women are learning to be romantic. Shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch's iconic and aging Lichtburg rehearsal studio, this piece walks the line between fiction and reality, dance and documentary, in the same way Bausch's deeply cathartic, and often autobiographical work did. Romance is a fertile intergenerational dialogue between past, present and future, and, through a fresh and powerful encounter, assures that the power of an aging legacy is never ending. Romance features Naomi Brito, longtime collaborators of Pina Bausch Julie Shanahan, and Julie Anne Stanzak, as well as Emily Castelli, Marissa Chibas, Taylor Drury, Heather Ehlers, Claudia Ortiz-Arraiza, and Ekaterina Shushakova.

Romance premiered at Cinedans in Amsterdam, NL in March 2023, and was awarded as an Outstanding Achievement in Dance Film at Choreoscope in Barcelona, Spain in October 2023.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Shay, Shanahan, Stanzak, and Castelli.

The Moovy Dance Film Festival has been taking place at the Filmforum in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since 2017 and, in addition to dance films, offers a presentation platform for immersive dance productions, i.e. for virtual, augmented and mixed reality with reference to dance. The aim of Moovy is to create a framework to make the connections between the fields of dance, film and digital art visible, to actively promote them and to stimulate collaboration between media artists, choreographers and dancers.

About the Artists

Naomi Brito was born in Brazil in 1997. She has lived in Germany since 2014 and completed her dance training at the Academy of Dance in Mannheim, part of the State University for Music and Performing Arts. In 2016, she continued her training at the Hamburg Ballet School for Classical Dance and joined the Hamburg Ballet John Neumeier as a trainee in 2017, later becoming a member of the Federal Youth Ballet founded by John Neumeier. She has been a member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch since 2020/21.

A staple of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal since joining in 1988, Julie Shanahan continues to dance in the company, serve as a rehearsal director, and restage signature repertoire for the Pina Bausch Foundation, recently the Rite of Spring with dancers across Africa, and Kontakthof in the Opera de Paris. In recent years, Shanahan has made creations with Tim Etchells, Alan Lucien Oyen, Rainer Behr, Gisele Vienne, and Samantha Shay. In 2021, she acted in Robert Wilson's legendary minimalist movement monologue "I was sitting on my patio..." Earlier this year, she performed in the US premiere of Bausch's Agua at BAM.

Julie Anne Stanzak has been a permanent member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal since 1986 and has danced in more than 30 pieces by Pina Bausch. Julie Anne Stanzak now works with various dance and theater institutions in Europe, the USA and Japan, teaches, creates pieces and works with people with physical and mental disabilities, such as at the RambaZamba Theater, Berlin, Teatro La Ribalta - Art of Diversity, Bozen or in the Compagnie L'Oiseau Mouche, Roubaix.

Samantha Shay is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, director of theatre and film, and movement artist. As a creative instigator, catalyzer and master collaborator, her acclaimed body of work challenges traditional boundaries, creates new connections, and dances across the fault lines between disciplines. She is currently a Special Research Fellow in Theatre Directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and is also the Artistic Director of Source Material, an interdisciplinary production company and artist collective, which she founded in 2014. From 2021 - 2023 Samantha was a Guest Artist & Researcher at Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, where she began as a Fulbright Scholar in 2021. During that time she created and launched numerous projects, some of which are still in development.

Samantha's theatrical work has been produced at The Grotowski Institute, the Theatre Olympics, RedCat, HERE Arts (New York), Tjarnarbio (Iceland), LungA (Iceland), and the Edinburgh International Fringe. As a filmmaker, she has made ambitious music videos for KÁRYYN, JFDR, Sóley, Mariee Siou, and Katie Gately, among others. Katie Gately's Waltz, directed by Shay and starring dancer Bobbi Jene Smith was an international success, playing numerous festivals, including BAFTA and Academy Award qualifying HollyShorts and CineQuest.

In 2016 her original piece, 'of Light', gained international attention when it was developed under the mentorship of Marina Abramović , endorsed by Abramović and praised by Björk in The Guardian. Two songs from the original score were released by Mute Records via composer KÁRYYN, with 'Moving Masses' named as Best New Track on Pitchfork.

From 2017-2019 Samantha's original piece made in collaboration with The Grotowski Institute and Nini Julia Bang, 'A Thousand Tongues' toured Europe and the US, receiving two nominations for Gríman - The Icelandic Theatre Awards - including Most Innovative Performance. In 2020 she made her first short dance film 'Homesick', in collaboration with Danielle Agami (Batsheva Dance Company, Ate9) which is published exclusively on NOWNESS. In 2020 she also directed the digitally-devised Zoom play 'In These Uncertain Times', in response to how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the arts. The New York Times described the performance as "like a lyrical essay, poetic, emotive and fluid," and it has been used as a resource by numerous academic and critical researchers as a pivotal theatrical work during the pandemic.

In 2021 Samantha received a Fulbright Scholarship Award to work with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, where she was highly focused on research into the works of Pina Bausch, and original artistic creations emerging from that research. During her time, she developed several projects, as well as assisted on a restaging of Bausch's Blaubart, under the rehearsal direction of Barbara Kaufmann and Helena Pikon. Her first creation in collaboration with the company was 'Mother Melancholia' and was co-commissioned by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and premiered at the Pina Bausch Zentrum in Wuppertal, and is currently playing festivals internationally. The film won the Audience Choice Award at Cinedans in the Netherlands.

In March 2023 at Cinedans she premiered her second Wuppertal-based work: Romance a dance film in response to her research into the works of Pina Bausch in an illuminating meeting point with the short story "It was Romance" by Miranda July. Developed in a close collaboration between Shay and an intergenerational ensemble of dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal, the creative point of departure for "Romance" centers on the company's first transgender dancer, Naomi Brito, and how her transition was catalyzed by the roles of women as she experienced them in the Bausch repertory. Shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch's iconic and aging Lichtburg rehearsal studio, "Romance" dances on the fault lines between fiction and reality, dance and documentary, in a fertile intergenerational dialogue between past, present and future, and through a fresh and powerful encounter, assures that the power of an aging legacy is never ending. Romance is also currently circulating festivals worldwide.

In October 2023 she accepted an award for outstanding achievement in dance film at Choreoscope in Barcelona, in connection with her two latest films, Mother Melancholia, and Romance. Samantha is still based in Wuppertal, and currently a Special Research Fellow at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she is preparing her first stage works since the pandemic, alongside a series of short films emerging from the same creation. The new stage project is a radical restaging of one of her earliest works, and will be produced in partnership with the Grotowski Institute in 2024.

MOOVY DANCE FILM FESTIVAL

The Moovy Dance Film Festival has been taking place at the Filmforum in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since 2017 and, in addition to dance films, offers a presentation platform for immersive dance productions, i.e. for virtual, augmented and mixed reality with reference to dance. The aim of Moovy is to create a framework to make the connections between the fields of dance, film and digital art visible, to actively promote them and to stimulate collaboration between media artists, choreographers and dancers.

Moovy shows works by internationally renowned choreographers and it attaches particular importance to accompanying local artists in their development over the long term. For more information, please visit https://www.moovy-festival.com/.