MOVING BODY-MOVING IMAGE Festival Will Return to Barnard College

After its sold-out 2018 debut, the biennale MOVING BODY - MOVING IMAGE Festival, conceived and curated by the accomplished choreographer, dancer, teacher, and filmmaker Gabri Christa, returns to Barnard College. The festival, which focuses on social themes in screendance (also called dance film or dance for camera,) in 2020 takes on Aging & Othering. The event will be held on Saturday, April 4 at Barnard College's Altschul Hall and Atrium and will feature two programs of shorts films. Throughout the day, installations, performances, and Virtual Reality projects will be available for viewing. A conversation about ageism will be facilitated by Karen Williams, an integrative wellness practitioner of "Empowered Aging." The guests include Susanna Sloat, a writer, editor, and art consultant; Anna Sang Park, a filmmaker, director, and producer; and Dr. Sheril Antonio, a distinguished NYU faculty educator, film scholar, and author. Deborah Jowitt, renowned dance scholar, author, and teacher, will be participating in discussions and also performing a short version of her solo, Body (in) Print (1995). The presentations will conclude with a closing reception. The event is free and open to the public but registration is required. To register, visit https://www.eventbrite.com.

The 2020 festival short films feature aging bodies both in dance and sports, from seven different countries, spanning a variety of topics and styles: from animation through dance film to documentaries. Among the highlights are: a lyrical Swedish short Forget Me Not, starring the acclaimed American choreographer and dancer Donald Byrd and beloved former ballerina Siv Ander; a gorgeously filmed and darkly humorous Scalamare, marked by unique imagination of its director, the award-winning choreographer Jiri Kylian; and a heartwarming documentary Alive & Kicking: The Soccer Grannies of South Africa, chronicling a sports team consisting of elderly women who play ball to heal trauma. The installation section, on view at the Barnard's Atrium, will include Deborah Hay, Not as Deborah Hay, an intimate portrait of the seminal Judson Church Dance Theater artist. VR projects - focused on dementia - will be available on view at the same location. One of them is Notes about Blindness, a unique sound-based project by the late UK scholar and artist Jonathan M. Hull who has been exploring blindness in his work since the 1990s.

Festival video trailer: https://vimeo.com/392590253

"I started the festival to give voice to social issues in the hybrid form of filmmaking, called screendance," says Gabri Christa, the creator and curator of MOVING BODY - MOVING IMAGE. "Our first edition focused on the depiction of the moving brown body and strived to see it not only from an artistic but also social and political angle. The NYC audience loved it; the festival films toured nationally and continue to be seen. This year, the theme is the moving aging body, and the approach is similar - we want people not only to watch but to engage with the community. Ageism is one of the last "isms" still allowed to perpetuate. The subject matter we take on is extremely important and affects every single person worldwide - yet it rarely gets the spotlight. I think it is important to create space and time for this vital conversation and invite as many diverse voices as possible to join."

Christa explains: "We received over 300 submissions but it was hard to find good films, works that break away from the stereotypes and show elders not only as frail and helpless but also as capable, strong, and determined. We know older dancers keep performing, but it is rare to actually see them at work. That's what we want to chance with our Aging & Othering program"

The subject of aging is close, personal and important for the curator: "I became interested in it when working on my one-woman multi-media piece Magdalena whose central character was my mother who suffers from dementia. Parallelly, I was an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Global Brain Health; this hands-on training exposed me to science and practice of caring for the elderly and draw my attention to the problem of ageism and ableism, so prevalent in our culture, and it made me think about aging truly deeply for the first time," she concludes.

The festival opens at 12 noon. Installations and VR will be on display throughout the day.

For schedule and more information about the festival, visit https://movement.barnard.edu/moving-body-moving-image.

SCREENINGS:

Program 1

Danse Macabre (animation; Hungary, 2018), directed and choreographed by Zsófia Csánki

Edges (documentary; USA, 2016), directed by Katie Stjernholm

Forget Me Not (dance film; Sweden, 2019), directed by Maud Karlsson

Cheek to Cheek (documentary; The Netherlands, 2018), directed by Malou Cartwright

Program 2

They Honeys and Bears (documentary; USA, 2016), directed by Veena Rao

Vanitas (dance film; Brazil, 2017), directed by Vinícius Cardoso, choreographed by Samuel Kavalerski

Sound and Sole (documentary; USA, 2018), directed by Cara Hagan

Scalamare (dance film; Italy/the Netherlands, 2017), directed and choreographed by Jiří Kilián

Alive & Kicking: The Soccer Grannies of South Africa (documentary; South Africa/the Netherlands, 2016) directed by Lara-Ann de Wet

Discussions with filmmakers will follow the screenings. More titles to be added to both programs.

2020 Film Selection Jury:
Abby Lee, Susanna Sloat, Karl-Mary Akre, Gabri Christa, Sheila Rohan

2020 MOVING BODY - MOVING IMAGE Festival is a production of Barnard Movement Lab and the Barnard/Columbia Department of Dance with support from the Sloan Media Center and was made possible through the support of Barnard College and funding through a Pilot Project grant from the Global Brain Health Institute, Alzheimer Association, Alzheimer's Society UK.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Gabri Christa (Founder, Curator, Moving Body-Moving Image Festival) hails from Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean and lives in New York. She makes original works for stage and screen that have received numerous prizes. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship for Choreography, an ABC television award for creative excellence for her short film High School and Pangea Day Festival's One World's 100 Most Promising Filmmakers distinction. She is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. Christa's Magdalena project about her mother and dementia premiered in New York City in 2018 and subsequently presented in Philadelphia, and is now touring nationally and abroad until 2021. She is working on several short subject films and on a feature. In 2015, Christa was appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to the Cultural Advisory Commission for the City of New York. At Barnard College, she is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at the Department of Dance and directs the Movment Lab. www.gabrichrista.com

Karen Williams (Speaker) is a content producer and integrative wellness practitioner who is equally at home working in front of and behind a camera. With an extensive background in film production, acting, social advocacy, healthcare administration, and advanced integrative healing therapies, Karen lends her multi-platform expertise to re-branding aging. Through public conversations, Karen illuminates the ways in which people over 40 are living, thriving, and disrupting fear-based associations with life's most natural process. She seeks to highlight how society can best facilitate what she calls "Empowered Aging." Returning to modeling after an almost three-decade hiatus, Karen has worked for such clients as Estée Lauder, Eileen Fisher, J. Crew, H&M, and Macy's. Her acting career encompasses numerous daytime and primetime TV shows in the U.S. and TV ad campaigns around the world. Karen holds a B.A. degree from Brown University and an M.A. degree from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Deborah Jowitt (Speaker and Performer) wrote about dance for The Village Voice from 1967 to 2011 and currently writes for artsjournal.com. She has published two collections, DanceBeat (1977) and The Dance in Mind (1985), as well as Time and the Dancing Image (1988) and Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (2004). She taught at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for about 40 years. www.deborahjowitt.com

Anna Sang Park (Speaker) is an award-winning South Korea-born and Philadelphia-raised filmmaker. She is the writer and director of Mrs. Cho - a short about an immigrant mother's gambling addiction - which was an Official Selection at numerous national and international film festivals. She has produced and directed for the BBC, PBS, ABC, NBC, National Geographic, Discovery, The History Channel, A&E, Lifetime Movie Network, HBO (the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary The Loving Story), TLC/Discovery (five seasons of the hit show Say Yes to the Dress and two of its spin-off series), TED Conferences, and TCG (Theatre Communications Group), among others. She produced the award-winning narrative feature Wallabout. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America, BGDM Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and the FilmmakeHers. www.annasangpark.com

Susanna Sloat (Speaker and Jury Member) is a writer and editor in New York City who has written about many kinds of dance - recently, mostly for Ballet Review and DanceTabs. She is the editor of two books: Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures (2010) and Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity (2002), both available from University Press of Florida. Susanna is 76 and regularly takes Congolese dance classes with Andoche Loubaki and Thelma Loubaki.

Dr. Sheril Antonio (Speaker) is an Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University as well as Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives. Her courses include Anatomy of Difference: The Other in Film, The World Through Art, and Language of Film. She received Curricular Development Challenge Grants for two courses: Issues in Contemporary African-American Cinema and The Summer Film & Video Program for High School Students. She is an advisor, mentor, and frequent lecturer whose presentations include: a live online debate about the movie Precious with Stanley Crouch; Keynote for Lincoln Center Education Forum and Future Filmmakers Workshop. She serves on the Board of the Ghetto Film School and has worked on several projects with the NAACP. Dr. Antonio is the author of the book Contemporary African American Cinema, 2001. Her other works include: Do Hollywood Films Truly Reflect Life in America?; a feature essay for the inaugural issue of Black Camera: The Urban-Rural Binary in Black American Film and Culture (Indiana University Press 2009); New Black Cinema: When Self-Empowerment Becomes Assimilation (Bertz Verlang, 2006); and Matriarchs, Rebels, Adventurers, and Survivors: Renditions of Black Womanhood in Contemporary African American Cinema (Sight & Sound, Supplement, July 2005). She also blogs for The Huffington Post.

Sheila Rohan (Speaker, Jury Member, Performer) is a founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Sheila toured extensively in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, performing as a soloist in several works in the repertoire, including Dougla, Biofera, Tones, and Rhythmetron. Sheila performed with dance companies, both ballet and modern. Sheila also danced the role of Rosa Parks in Gordon Parks' television movie, Martin: A Ballet, and performed in the 1991 production of Porgy and Bess, choreographed by Carmen de Lavallade, at the Metropolitan Opera House. Sheila is a choreographer and ballet teacher. She was an assistant to renowned choreographers Louis Johnson, John Jones, Talley Beatty, Walter Nicks, and Walter Rutledge and choreographed pieces of her own for schools, theater groups, and cultural organizations. Sheila is currently on the Board of Directors of the Romare Bearden Foundation, a Founding Member of Clark Center NYC, and a performer with 5 Plus Ensemble, a theater group for dancers over 50.

The Barnard College Department of Dance, located in a world dance capital, offers an interdisciplinary program that integrates the study of dance within a liberal arts setting of intellectual and creative exploration. The major builds upon studio courses, the Department's productions at Miller Theater, New York Live Arts and other venues, as well as a rich array of dance studies courses, allowing students' creative work to develop in dialogue with critical inquiry into the history, culture, theory, and forms of western and non-western performance, typically enhanced by study in other disciplines. Students work with accomplished artists whose work enriches contemporary American dance; they also study with outstanding research scholars. Making, thinking about, and writing about art are an essential part of the liberal arts education. For this reason, the Department of Dance offers technique courses for students of all levels of expertise, while opening its other courses to majors and non-majors alike, who may also audition for its productions. The Department partners with cultural institutions in New York City to connect students with the professional world.

The Movement Lab, opened in the fall of 2018 and is based at Barnard College's Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, is a flexible modular space for movement research, exploration, production, collaboration, and interdisciplinary interaction. The Lab's trans-media function serves to enhance critical thinking and learning through body and brain connection as it seeks to explore emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology. Movement Lab works closely with the Barnard Dance Department and hosts multiple classes each semester, where students benefit from the lab function of our space and the technical resources - among them, Stillness Lab, Sandbox Series, MeMoSa's (Media Movement Salons), Motion Releases, and Pop Ups. It also runs an interdisciplinary artist-in-residence program for professionals - the recent AIR fellows included Norah Zuniga Shaw, Chisa Hidaka, Cari Ann Shim Sham, and Kenji Williams, to name just a few - and student residency for up-and-coming artists. For more information, visit https://movement.barnard.edu

Festival team:

Gabri Christa, Festival Director & Curator
Abby Lee, Associate Producer & Co-Curator
Karl-Mary Akre, Associate Producer & Co-Curator
Allison Costa, Assistant Producer
Georgia Michalovic, Artist Relations
Guy deLancey, Programmer & Technologist, MovementLab

Diane Roe: Senior Administrator Department of Dance

movement.barnard.edu/moving-body-moving-image