WomenCinemakers, Special Edition, Vol.24 by WomenCinemakers

PAMELA ARCE KARA DUNNE TÂNIA MOREIRA DAVID YERIN LEE SONIA SABRI MICHELLE ORDORICA LAYLA MROZOWSKI MATILDA COBANLI ROBIN BISIO MICHAELA GERUSSI TRACY VALCARCEL VASHTI GORACKE

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Contents 04 Vashti Goracke

132 Sonia Sabri

Bear Ice

NU BODY

158

Michaela Gerussi & Tracy Valcarcel

Yerin Lee

Last Place We Met

넋 : Soul

190

Robin Bisio

Tânia Moreira David

Aphrodite's Wave

Casa, Corpo sem fim

206

Layla Mrozowski & Matilda Cobanli

Kara Dunne

La Casa Gelato

She's Going Down Stairs

112

236

Michelle Ordorica

Pamela Arce

OBRA NEGRA

Rehearsal

Women Cinemakers meets

Vashti Goracke Lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Bear Ice shows how global warming effects the lives of polar bears in Arctic habitats. Through contemporary movement and expression a dancer portrays a female polar bear who is living in a vanishing world of ice. The story shows her (the polar bear's) vulnerability and struggle to survive and is a call to action to help fight climate change. "Bear Ice" was created and produced by Vashti Goracke and was also choreographed and performed by Vashti Goracke. Logan Meis was director of photography and music was originally composed by Gavin Brivik. The set design was created by Ricardo Lopez. Still Photography was taken by Michelle Hudson, and the film was edited my Andrew M. McCarttar and Vashti Goracke.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Showing how global warming effects the lives of polar bears and Arctic saltwater ecosystems, is a captivating dance short film by choreographer and performer Vashti Goracke: capturing the resonance between natural enviroment and the language of human body, Bear Ice is a powerful allegory of human condition in our unstable and everchanging contemporary age, providing the viewers with such an heightened and multilayered visual experience: we are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to Goracke's multifaceted and stimulating artistic production.

Hello Vashti and welcome to : we would like to invite our readers to visit in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Over the years you trained in many different styles including ballet, modern, jazz, contemporary, and commedia dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;arte: among the other training experiences, you spent four years at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and you eventually graduated from the University of Kansas with your BFA in Dance Performance. How did these experiences influence your evolution as a dancer and an artist, in general? Moreover, what did address you to focus a part

Women Cinemakers of your artistic research on ? Growing up as a child I always had a deep love for dancing and storytelling, but it was my dance training, academic education, and various life obstacles that transformed me into the artist I am today. Training and performing in multiple dance forms gave me a strong understanding of dance technique and a passion for the beauty of dance. However, studying commedia dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;arte and choreographic composition courses in college refined my love of storytelling. These experiences challenged me to push the boundaries of storytelling through artistic processes so that non-dancers could also appreciate it. Additionally, I have had several immobilizing injuries in my life. It was during those hard times that my creative juices overflowed providing a highly concentrated atmosphere for me to work without the stress of performing. So it was all these elements combined that have evolved me into the artist I am today. The intersection of my choreography with video began towards the end of high school when I started seeing how dance in the theatre was waning in respect to the general population. I realized I had been consumed in the small bubble of dance culture for so long that I thought everybody appreciated dance as much as I did. As I started college, I became more aware that the general population doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t usually care about the beauty or storytelling aspects of dance. They only care about the entertainment value of dance. Because there is a wide variety of pompous entertainment styles, I foresaw dance needing a new way to survive in our culture today. I believed the sustainability of dance as art called for new mediums to present dance. This new medium would have to be relatable to the normal population plus it would have to contain elements that were technically and choreographically respected within dance culture. The medium I chose was video because of

Women Cinemakers its widespread accessibility and endless shelf-life. So my vision for dance on film had become a means to further a secure future for dance. To pursue this vision I continuously sought for opportunities to collaborate with non-dancing artists such as musicians, videographers, editors, composers, visual artists, costumers, or anybody else I met that was as passionate about dance on film as I was. For this special edition of we have selected , an extremely interesting dance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once impressed us of the allegorical qualities of your video, is the way it creates unparalleled visions of the ideas of vulnerability and struggle to survive through the language of human body, enhanced by sapient choreography: when walking our readers , would you tell us through the genesis of how did you develop the initial idea? The genesis of Bear Ice happened in two parts. Both happened during my time at the University of Kansas (KU). In January of 2014 I was forced to transfer midsemester into the dance department at KU because of a horrendous back injury that didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t allow me to finish my degree at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). During that spring semester two very important things happened. Firstly, I was able to work with some extremely important people that would help me find healing for my back injury. Secondly, I was enrolled in a class called Environmental Choreography by Patrick Suzeau. Throughout this class we were inspired by Suzeau to create originative works outside of the studio within atypical environments. For this assignment I chose the environment of The Panorama at KUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Biodiversity Institute and Natural

History Museum, which can be explored in depth via this link:https://biodiversity.ku.edu/exhibits/thepanorama. In short, The Panorama is a special place in Kansas that is considered an American cultural treasure created by Lewis Lindsay Dyche. Within this panorama is a display of Arctic tundra life and several stuffed polar bears on display. Many of the polar bears were behind the glass of the panorama, but

one was in the middle of the foyer. It was with this bear that allowed me to meticulously study the size, paws, fur, and body stature of polar bears in a personal setting. Although I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t touch it, I was able to choreograph intimately around the bear incorporating it into the environmental assignment. This class project was the forerunner of what would eventually be Bear Ice.

class ended up being about longitude, latitude, earth platelets, and hardly anything to do with marine life. It required extremely advanced trigonometry and calculus. Needless to say, I was in way over my head in that class! I was full of dread the entire summer because the class was immensely stressful and tedious. I spent hours upon hours of studying and tutoring with friends just to keep my head above water in that class. As the final project approached, I had to come up with something that I was knowledgeable enough to talk about for a multipage final assignment. A few chapters in our Oceanography textbook covered Arctic sea ice, its ecosystems, and how climate change is drastically affecting it. These chapters rebirthed the ideas that were marinating in me since my last environmental project about polar bears. Since my body and my back were getting stronger each day I decided to create a dance about sea ice and polar bears. I began a long process of drafting choreographic ideas that would fit the requirements of the final assignment plus accurately cover aspects of oceanography. Our class assignment had extremely specific guidelines in regards to online formatting, the use of media, and overall coherency. My artistic portion would only consist of a few pages of the final assignment which led me to intense research about polar bear life, sea ice, and climate change. Although this research was grueling at the time, this process ended up being the labor pains that brought Bear Ice to life.

The following summer I was required to take some extra electives to finish my degree at the University of Kansas, so I started looking for electives that would keep my interest for the summer. One of the classes I chose was Oceanography. Not knowing much about the topic, I pictured the class being focused on marine life and its ecosystems. However, the

My teacher was very sceptical of me creating a dance film to use in my final oceanography project. I still have a comment she wrote on one of the early drafts of my assignment: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Be sure to go into detail about sea ice and the phenomena causing sea ice to melt in this modern world, and also on the physiology of polar bears, that may be considered marine mammals. You must tie in the science of oceanography with the creative art of

Women Cinemakers dance, and not just focus on the dance alone as a means of communication.” (G. Macpherson) Putting this project together under the intense speculation of my professor felt like playing a game of darts. Not only did I have to be on point with the science of oceanography and the physiology of polar bears, but even more than that I had to hit the target with my choreography and cinemaking in order to tell an abstract and imaginative story that a scientist would approve of as factual and real. We have appreciated the way your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects : rigorous approach to how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your ? performative gestures and How importance does play in your process? In regards to my choreographic process Bear Ice was completely unorthodox in comparison to my other works. I am usually a heavy planner but in Bear Ice I used structured improv. I had spent so much time in research and pre-production that I didn’t have time to set choreography. Thus, I decided to utilize structured improv for all the scenes. I vividly remember showing up on set and speaking to the cinematographer, Logan Meis, before our shoot. When I told him I told him I didn’t have any choreography his mouth dropped open in bewilderment and he said, “You don’t have any choreography?” I replied, “No, but don’t worry because I have a plan.” I did, although, have a solid plan which is extremely important when doing structured improv. I had done so much research ahead of time that I knew exactly how I wanted my body to move in resemblance to a polar bear. I had created a diagram outlying how

A still from

Women Cinemakers the bear’s personality would change as the iceberg melted that I followed throughout the shoot. Additionally, I felt completely comfortable in improv after my time training at Juilliard so I knew my movement would be successful. With its gorgeous mise en scène, has drawn heavily from and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful between space and movement: how did you select the location and how did it affect your performative gestures? Originally, I wanted to film this dance in a solid white room to represent the snow and ice of the Arctic. When all the locations I wanted to reserve on campus were not available I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I called my set designer, Ricky, and asked him to start naming ideas of places that he thought might work for our film. He casually mentioned Clinton Lake as he was listing off ideas. I stopped him mid-sentence and said, "That is it! Great idea, Ricky! Clinton lake is perfect!" Clinton Lake was just outside of our college town so we took a trip to scout out the best location. We were looking for a location that was good for the film crew, and a location that looked similar in appearance with the Arctic Tundra when it is warm. For Bear Ice I envisioned a dancer dancing on an iceberg that was melting away until there was nothing left causing the dancer to vulnerably surrender to death. To do this, I had to build an "iceberg" within the lake. My set designer Ricky was the mastermind in designing this structure within the lake. I had requested block-like pieces that could be used in unison to make a large iceberg but could also be pulled apart individually portraying melting ice. The end result was Ricky’s beautiful design that was both safe and efficient.

Women Cinemakers The “ice caps” we created definitely affected my movement within the choreography and our shot list for filming. The glue that Ricky had bought was guaranteed waterproof glue. However, shortly after shooting in the lake we discovered the glue wasn’t waterproof and the “ice cap” tables started breaking down. There was no turning back at this point. We were on a limited budget so we couldn’t purchase more materials, and we were on an even tighter time limit as the final assignment deadline was quickly approaching. We had to start re-planning our shot list on the spot. We had originally planned an eight hour shoot for a five minute video, but because of the way the tables were breaking down we ended up only shooting for four hours. All of us on set were concerned how this would affect the quality of our film. Nonetheless, it was this natural breaking down of our tables by water that produced a true-to-life “melting of the sea ice” effect. All of my movement while portraying the polar bear that looks shaky and unstable was real! It was hard to balance because the tables were becoming soft and the lake water on the tables made them slippery like ice. Almost every single fall into the water was a true reaction of the the tables disintegrating. We couldn't have asked for asked for a better turn out. These tables naturally “melting” really added to our film. Featuring essential and well-orchestrated choreography, involves the audience into such an heightened visual experience, urging them to challenge their perceptual categories to create : what are you hoping will trigger in the spectatorship? In particular, how much important is for you to address the viewer's imagination in order to elaborate ? After many revisions during the creative process, I narrowed my ultimate goal into two things. Firstly, I

wanted to show the viewer what it was like for a polar bear to lose its home from the polar bear's perspective. I wanted to give my audience what I was craving in my imagination when I signed up for oceanography initially - a deeper connection to marine mammal life. In order to do this, I created a character that had human traits but animalistic qualities and vulnerability. There aren’t a lot dance films about mammal’s from the mammal’s perspective so I felt challenged and compelled to produce one. Secondly, I wanted my film to be a beacon of encouragement to the viewer shining the message that simplicity is key to sustainability. Currently in the world there are many environmental laws and bans that choke small businesses and overwhelm ordinary people that are struggling just to get by day to day. More often than not, these types of activism cause people to become discouraged and resentful towards bettering climate change. To combat this, I wanted the message of my film to lighten the yoke for individuals nationally and internationally by focusing on simple ways to improve sustainability. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? I would consider Bear Ice completely abstract since it motivates the imagination of the viewer to see a reality that isn’t happening. Obviously the film doesn’t have a real dancing bear or actual melting ice caps. That being said, there was a plethora of purposeful symbolism in my work regarding a polar bear's physiology, behavior,

Women Cinemakers and habitat. I spent many intense hours researching polar bears and their environment in order to create a film that was scientifically accurate as well as artistically abstract. You will notice I chose to wear a dark costume to represent the black skin of a polar bear in contrast with my white skin which resembled the whitish fur of a polar bear. I wanted the dancer to play and swim in the water to show how polar bears are great swimmers. There is a scene where the dancer dunks her head in the water which is symbolic choreographically to polar bears when they are seal hunting. The choreography itself is animalistic in nature being heavy, burly, and organic. There are times when you will see the dancer expand her bodyweight as flat as possible. This directly represents the way polar bears flatten out their giant bodies to cross shallow ice. Throughout my research I found a myriad of footage and images of polar bears falling into the water because of thin ice. So I had planned several falls into my choreography, but as mentioned above mostly all the falls in Bear Ice happened naturally! The relationship between sound and visual are crucial in your practice and we have appreciated the way the music by Gavin Brivik provides the footage of Bear Ice with such an ethereal and a bit enigmatic atmosphere: how would you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see the relationship between sound and movement? For my final oceanography assignment there wasn’t time to score the music in advance. Most films are scored in post-production anyway so I wasn’t concerned. I knew after the assignment that I would have my friend and film score composer, Gavin Brivik, score the final film. During the film shoot I used a

song called “Varuo,” by the well known Icelandic Band Sigur Ross. The title means "warning" in English and the song ambiguously mentions "thousands falling" because of melting ice. I thought this song was serendipitously perfect and it kept me inspired while dancing during the shoot. When the film was ready to be scored, I turned it over to Gavin. Gavin and I had worked together at UMKC and in other projects. I had total confidence in his composition abilities so I gave him free reign while scoring my project. I wanted him to score what his imagination produced when he interpreted my work. The end result was definitely ethereal and enigmatic! I thought his music complimented my movement well while giving the viewer a sense of confusion. The music is pleasant but the character is dying which causes that enigmatic feeling when watching Bear Ice. is a powerful call to action to help fight climate change and save polar bears that are experiencing habitat loss and endangerment, and we have highly appreciated the way raises awareness on this theme through the language of human body. Not to mention that these days almost everything, ranging from Marina Abramović's ' ' to Hannah Wilke's , could be considered , do you think that your practice could be considered political, in a certain sense? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some ? I think it is dangerous to put labels on art. To put a label on art like “political” doesn’t seem courteous to the art itself in my opinion. My goal in my creative process is to create a positive impact. Whatever impact my art leaves is going to be different

Women Cinemakers depending on the individual that experiences it. Thus, the end result of my work is always left to the viewer. My goal was not to shame or blame anybody that won’t or can’t do something about climate change. Much shaming and blaming happens in the name of climate change. I am not in favor of that kind of activism because I believe it is inefficient, divisive, and shows a lack of creative problem solving. For this reason, I set out to forge a different way to promote awareness and care for climate change while encouraging people that “simple changes make big impacts.” If my artistic research is special because I am a woman, it would be because there aren’t many women choreographers and cinemakers in comparison to these otherwise male dominated industries. There aren’t a lot of us women out there creating cinema work, but for the ones that exist we are definitely forging a path and that path is very special. I think it will be even more special in hindsight within the next 20 years. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something ', however in the last decades there ' are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this field? I would describe my personal experience as an unconventional artist as a rocky metamorphosis. The reason is that people never see your artistic vision

Women Cinemakers until you create it for them. This can be frustrating and result in hurtful criticism at the initial stages of an idea. I have learned that you have to overcome this negativity and trust your instincts. In the end people are usually blown away by the masterpiece you created. This kind of acceptance is rocky, but that is the life of an unconventional artist. It is our job to bring to life what can’t be seen or imagined. I believe that the future of women in interdisciplinary fields will be in their ability to take meaningless and unfortunate situations and turn them into creative fuel. The idea of Bear Ice blossomed out of a meaningless oceanography class that seemed like a waste of my collegiate time. The movement of Bear Ice came from my body that was rebuilding itself from an unfortunate back injury. Nonetheless, I chose to turn my circumstances into a film that became a career gem and is currently pioneering a new way to merge art with science. It was my tenacity and inventive mind that didn’t let obstacles stop me from creating what was in my heart. We women have many trials in our lives, but it is our attitude towards them and our ability to turn these trials into creative fuel that will successfully carry us into the future. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Vashti. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Interestingly, I see my dance career moving gradually away from the stage and more in the direction of film and commercial work. My choreography has already taken that path, but now my dance career seems to be headed that way as well. We will see how it evolves over time. In regards to film, I have several plans to grow YACO Productions. Although, in order to keep YACO’s

Women Cinemakers promise of complete originality and high production quality that takes a lot of funding. Finding and providing funding slows the creative process down. I look forward to more YACO Productions in the future but it will be a gradually fruiting tree. To produce dance films at a speedier rate, I have recently designed a sister company, Rozmova Films, in partnership with dancer and choreographer, Chelsea Davis. The goal is to create a company that entirely runs through smartphone technologies in order to cut production costs and allow us to generate more content. Rozmova Films will be launching in the United States and Asia in 2019. Finally, I would like to take a moment to thank all the artists that helped me in the production of Bear Ice. Each member of the crew generously invested their talents into the film and I couldn't be more grateful to share this life experience with them. I would like to acknowledge Logan Meis as cinematographer, Ricardo Lopez as set designer, Michelle Hudson as photographer, Gavin Brivik as composer, and Andrew McCarttar and Gabriel Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor as editor. Last but not least, I would like to thank all the members of the Women Cinemakers Team for letting me share the behind the scenes activities that established Bear Ice. Websites: www.vashtigoracke.com www.yacoproductions.com www.rozmovafilms.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Michaela Gerussi Tracy Valcarcel (b. 1988) is a Peruvian video and movement artist based in Montreal. Trained in physical theatre, photography and dance, she moved to Canada to study Interdisciplinary Performance/ Intermedia Arts at Concordia University where she received her BFA in 2012. In 2009 she was invited to participate in a month-long Laboratory of Creative Research hosted by the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. This experience marked her profoundly and still serves her as an inspiration to work with live performance. She is interested in the meeting point between movement and technology; exploring the sensorial capabilities of video and digitizing the body and its physiological signals. In her practice, she uses the camera and onscreen moving image to consider the body from an anatomical and cultural standpoint, measuring to what extent our identities are shaped by memory, environment and habit. is a Canadian dance artist based in Berlin. Working in both live performance and video, she is fascinated by a highly sensitized perception of the body and our capacity to extend that into space. She studied at Concordia University in Montreal with a focus on choreography, video and performance, where she received her BFA in contemporary dance in 2014. Michaelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dance practice is nourished by her research into the nervous system, proprioception and attunement, in relation to her ongoing studies in Biodynamic Cranial Sacral therapy. She layers subtle perceptual phenomena with a functional, dynamic approach to movement. Since 2008 she has pursued her interest in film and the moving image, both in its application to dance and as a choreographic device in its own right. She is a member of the Directorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guild of Canada since 2016. Michaelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent projects address the continuous process of reconciling the image of the body with the complex, tactile experience of embodiment.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

questions regarding your backgrounds. You have both solid

and Dora S. Tennant

formal trainings: Michaela holds a BFA in Contemporary

womencinemaker@berlin.com

Dance from Concordia University in Montreal, where Tracy

Hello Michaela and Tracy, and welcome to We would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of

studied intermedia/cyberarts: how did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? And how does your

cultural substratum due to your studies in Biodynamic Cranial-sacral therapy direct the trajectory of your artistic research? T: Studying a multidisciplinary degree such as the Intermedia Cyberarts program at Concordia materialised and in a way gave form to my varied interest in different disciplines of art by giving me a platform to “mix & match” those disciplines I was most intrigued by. It allowed me not only to explore the meeting point between, for instance, installation art and creative writing but it also encouraged me to collaborate with people studying in other departments such as the Contemporary Dance department. The program really fostered my view of art making as an interdisciplinary process and this sensibility has carried over into the work I am doing now. M: My studies at Concordia really gave me a chance to explore my interests and practice as a choreographer, with a wide understanding of potential production styles. The unique program gave a lot of freedom for creativity, and threw us into a choreographic role from the beginning. What is special about Concordia is it’s breadth of high quality arts programs, and the fact that it is situated within such a rich creative city. The environment inherently encouraged interdisciplinarity and cultural exchange. I took a lot of IMCA (Intermedia/Cyberarts) and film courses there, which found their way into my dance-based artistic practice. Cranial-sacral therapy is based on embodied skills of perception. As much as my experiences as a dancer supported me in learning that work, the things I learned from cranial-sacral affected the way I sense my body and my environment, which is fundamentally tied to the dance work I create (especially when I perform it myself). In part, Cranial Sacral is concerned with slower, more subtle actions and sensations which exist beneath the gross movements of the body. This heightened state of listening it demands has informed my artistic sensibilities, and I think this aspect of the work is particularly evident in both the performative state I worked with in ‘last place we met’, which of course was extended to our (mine and

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers Tracy’s) shared experience of the time and space in the piece. Rather than being action oriented, a lot of our approach and process for this piece consisted of waiting, getting a sense of our surroundings and allowing things to emerge. For this special edition of

we have selected

, an extremely interesting dance short film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of the hybrid quality of the results of your insightful inquiry into is the way the results of your artists research provides the viewers with such an intense visual experience, by a sapient composition. When walking our readers through the genesis of

, would you tell us how did

you develop the initial idea? T: We didn’t really start

with a fixed idea in mind.

Michaela and I had just performed for another choreographer’s work and we knew we wanted to keep working together and make a short film. We took an artist residency in northern France at beautiful former convent in a small village that gathers creators of diverse cultures and artistic backgrounds. Upon arriving we started a process that was built around discussions, writing, movement and spending a lot of time inhabiting different corners of the convent. A lot of questions came out of this sitespecific and experiential research. Mainly, how can we better understand ownership and agency in space through the experience of the body? What are the nuances that the body holds on to from a familiar place to an unfamiliar one? How do we form identities in relation to places where we don’t have histories? Can these established identities change over time? M: Another relevant aspect of this project for us was establishing a working methodology together, and understanding the most comfortable way to collaborate. We were also inevitably influenced by our

environment, and some of our other research centred around

We both knew we wanted the camera work to be as dynamic and

studying the relationships between camera, subject and environment.

moving as Michaelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role, so this led to the decision of not using a

The work that came out of this residency is a reflection of this

tripod for example, and going handheld instead. Another aesthetic

ongoing study and the ideas around body/environment which Tracy

choice we made was the use of unfocused material. It is sometimes

has mentioned.

harder than you think to let go of wanting the perfect framing or the

Elegantly shot,

features stunning

cinematography by Tracy Valcarcel: what were your when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens?

perfectly focused subject with appropriate depth of field but we felt like that was one of this workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s many challenges. There was something about that setting, that time and the dialogues (whether by movement or speech) that came out from this whole

T: We had such a rich environment to begin with. Some decisions

process that somehow allowed or made way for the roughness that

were clear from the beginning and others developed in the process.

comes along with a spontaneous camera eye.

There were some interesting discussions regarding the gaze of the

One thing that really fed our aesthetic decisions was our desire to

film because of course what my eye is seeing in space while holding

stay away from the conventional subject-object relationship when

the camera is not exactly what the camera eye sees. The latter is a

filming dance. We were interested in this idea of a

reduced fraction of the former and at times this would result in very

camera, space and body and the ambiguity that this provoked for

strong material but some others it would heighten an alter

the gaze. Is it Michaelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s point of view or are we seeing her from the

subjectivity.

outside?

We had to be careful about the gaze because there is a fine line

between an intimate and voyeuristic gaze in our culture especially

between a camera lens, the environment and the body. Rather than

when filming (female) bodies. We were aware of the tendency of

working with defined roles where the performer is the subject and

certain shots to become voyeuristic so this at times informed the

the camera person the observer, we were interested in subverting

cinematography of the work. Mainly, the choice not to capture

that traditional subject-observer dynamic. Using improvisation, we

Michaelaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face.

were free to take stillness, react to the soundscape and discover

between

explores space and the potential for dialogue

ways to respond to the architecture of the space. In our approach, neither the actions of the performer nor the camera are prioritized, and these relationships (performer:space and performer:camera) are, throughout the video, in constant negotiation. reflects

regarding the reciprocal

dialogue between lens, environment and performative gestures: how would you consider the relationship between the necessity of ?

scheduling the details of a performance How much importance does play

in your practice?

T: It was challenging at times to attend to the aesthetic details of a shot, being the person behind the camera, without falling into a purely technical role. It became an exercise in how I could integrate my experience as a moving sensing body into the process even if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m the one having access to the on-screen image. I found ways to make this possible by

with

my body and letting myself respond to Michaela and the space we were in. M: In our initial explorations, we developed a shooting method which was really dependent on improvisation, where both of us were attentive to the moment and performance in quite a delicate way. Once we had that established, we were able to find a way to communicate without breaking this sense of flow and awareness each other and the space. After spending a lot of time on film sets, I know now that performers rarely have the luxury of working in that kind of environment. Things are more planned and fragmented, and the crucial technical elements of the on-screen image make the set feel a lot more practical than artistic. T: In more than one instance we would get something we really liked on camera but then when rewatching it we would find something technically dissatisfying so we would reshoot it, which never worked. There was something about the quality of the initial spontaneity which was lost when staging the exact same moment. At first it was frustrating because you would think you were refining a shot by doing it, correcting it and doing it again, but at some point we understood that in gaining more technically

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers pleasing material, we were also depriving the shot of the rawness which comes along with improvisation. In the end we both decided to keep the originals and prioritise the feeling over the technique. Sound plays a crucial role in your video and we have highly appreciated the way it provides ethereal and poetic

with such an

, as well as it provides

with an enigmatic atmosphere, capable of challenging the viewers' perceptual categories: how would you consider the relationship between performative gestures and sound? T: We wanted to render sound as important as any of the visual scenographic elements we had in the site while filming. We knew from the beginning that if we were to study and engage the space around us, and by extension the on-screen environment, we had to use live sound and field recordings. We wanted to use only sound that had taken part of our

in the space, not sound that had been born in the editing

process. Just like we wanted sound to influence our decisions in movement, we hoped for this sound to equally translate the atmosphere into the final film product. All these rich details in the soundscape help to heighten the sensorial richness of the video. For the most part, we used higher quality sound recordings and pasted them onto the existing footage. So we played around a lot with matching our collected sounds and images, seeing how to heighten the atmosphere of each vignette. Part of the soundscape of the film includes birds, wind, church bells, rainâ&#x20AC;Ś On one occasion while filming a scene, we happened to record other artists who were also working in the space. Their music inevitably bled into our soundscape and rather than wanting to remove it in the post production, we loved it and kept it in the final cut. The decision to include silence was also an important one for the end product. There were many moments of stillness not only between

Michaela, the camera and I but also surrounding us in the location and so we wanted to capture this. M: In general, moving in silence allowed me to react more freely to my own impulses and relationship with my concrete environment. The choice to use very little music somehow gives the whole piece more of a cinematic quality and atmospheric narrative than a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;danceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; video. But of course the video itself is more about environment than about a dancing body. Sound, and especially music, can be very powerful, colouring how gestures are read. This is quite evident in the one scene which uses music by Jan Jelinek. When we finished editing this scene, it was interesting to see how tempting it was to use more music throughout the film but there was something special about staying truthful to the moment when we shot it. T: That scene came out of a rainy afternoon when Michaela and I found this beautiful empty studio. We played some music, started warming up and that warm up led to the shooting of that scene. It felt only natural to include the sound that accompanied that same moment. It's no doubt that

as the one that

you have established over the years are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your work? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines? T: Much of what drives our collaborative work is the desire to bridge our disciplines in a non-hierarchical way, capturing the liveness of performance in video and pushing the embodiment capabilities of the

interview

Women Cinemakers

A still from

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Women Cinemakers digital medium. Our working method proposes a dialogue of technical, artistic and performative perspectives where we share agency on all aspects of the creative process. Together we co-direct, from the creation of movement material to the editing of the moving image. M: In regards to our working method on

, we were both

making creative choices at the same time and navigating the meeting points between them. I had the agency of being the mover on camera, but Tracy had the agency of seeing the scene and making aesthetic choices in relation to my movement and the space/environment. Without being able to have an outside perspective on my work, I trusted Tracy to relate to what I was doing through the gaze of the camera, and to suggest adjustments. Thematically speaking our collaborative research deals with the body and its environment, investigating how movement in space (as observed by the eye) translates as movement on screen; what is lost and what is gained between the two? What are the possibilities for translation, transmission and delivery? These questions are relevant to both of our individual artistic interests and provide a natural overlap. T: Through performance and video, Michaela and I have made work which accesses corporeal, spatial and virtual expressions of location and dislocation. These themes are so essential to my own personal experience, which feeds my ongoing creative and critical investigations. I have found in movement a language that is able to communicate presence, internalisation, alienation, adjustment and ownership in relationship to space. Your short films are hot with a keen eye to details and both and

unveil : we daresay that this aspect of your

practice addresses the viewers to unveil the ubiquitous bond between the individual and outside reality. How do you consider

playing within your artistic research? T: I often find that considering the space where the action takes place results in a broader array of aesthetic opportunities by allowing for exterior elements to inform the action. I am very interested in how the visual or historical richness of the environment around the subject can translate in a moving image. In my work I try to lend an eye to those fractions of moments where it may be the surrounding itself performing a dance. For instance, the way light moves and falls into a space, we see this in one particular vignette of the film and I think sometimes in real life we lack the mental quietness, perhaps even the desire to notice these moments in our surroundings. Filming them is a way to counteract this, to document them in a medium that makes these small fractions of time endure. Dance and theatre, as live art forms, demand from the viewer a particular attention and ‘slowness’, to sit in real time and witness the unfoldment of different states, in the performer(s) and, by extension, in themselves. With video, however, this presence and attention from the viewer is threatened by a) the potential to fast-forward or skim through the work, and b) our society’s expectation of screen-based work to be action driven, and that slowness often equates to a lack of content. ‘Slowness’, both as a radical way of working with video and as a creative methodology, is imbedded in our work and certainly exemplified in . In this way, our work hopes to open up a dialogue centered on alternate modes of working with moving image and promoting in the viewer a more contemplative way to digest screenbased art. M: Part of what we’re researching is around the notion that the human body does not exist in a vacuum; that we are always in dialogue with our environment, affected by our surroundings whether we recognize it or not. Working with Tracy on this project has provided another context to

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers explore this theme. Specifically, cinema offers different opportunities for a performer to relate to their environment than in a conventional performance setting. In a black box setting, the dancer has more of a role in defining or creating the context with their performance, using a range of sonic, scenographic and theatrical strategies. In this work, the research can be more grounded in the aesthetic complexity of the physical world, what is already there, and how I interact with it. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that " ": how do you consider the relation between of the ideas you aim to communicate and of creating your artworks? T: I think both the ideas and the creation of the artwork itself are inextricably linked together. In the process of making

the ideas we were working with came about first physically and then, through called-in discussions, we developed them in their conceptual/abstract form. Rather than starting off with abstract ideas and then figuring out how to communicate them through the video medium, it felt like our process started the other way around. M: In this case, the physical act was woven into the development of abstract ideas so that neither of them can exist nor grow independently. For me, the word ‘representation’ is a loaded word when it comes to dance. There is a particular relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ because my work is actually difficult to separate from my body, and I’m experiencing the thing I’m making through my body. I consider an abstract feature as a physical act, an experience, rather than a representation of it by a body. I think for any artist, the work comes from an experience of their whole self, thoughts, feelings, perceptions. My

brain is part of my body, not an idea-generator in command of what I do and the dance work I create. Your works are open to personal associations and we appreciate the way they often urges the viewers to develop personal narratives: how much important is for you to create a flow of images capable of triggering the spectatorship perceptual substratum in order to address them to elaborate

M: I think it’s important to point out that we come from a performance background rather than cinema, and in this process we were often allured by traditional filmic storytelling methods which either felt dishonest or not in line with our values in art-making. These are important considerations to better understand what we aren’t and aren’t doing in our work with screen images. In this piece, the woman acts a gateway into sensorial immersion of the space, which of course becomes a singular, individual experience for the viewer. This then gets folded into their narrative or intellectual interpretations of the work. I hope to offer viewers a sense of embodiment by way of the images and aesthetic approach we use. T: It wasn’t until we were deep in production that we realised the woman in the film didn’t have a story, there wasn’t any narrative that held her as a character per se. At first this was challenging due to an expectation when making video work of there being a plot or at least a developed character but in truth, neither of us was interested in making one up. The work didn’t call for one and we realised both our interest lay in creating raw, sincere imagery that allowed for people to interpret it as they wished. Part of the reason why our works intentionally leave room for the viewers to develop a narrative is because of a desire to make the viewer an active participant in the work. Another aspect is wanting to create something that isn’t fixed, that is moving and malleable. The context in which this piece was made has a personal and particular relevance for us. It was important for us that the cinematography

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers conveyed the specificity and richness of that spatial moment. At the same time, allows for multiple narratives to co-exist and those which emerge when viewed are all layered and true. Our stance on this is connected to our desire to unlearn the fact that stories are only told in the form of words and actions. With this work we hoped to evoke stories through light, movement, vignettes, feelings, silence, sounds, memories and associations. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something '

', however in the last decades there are

signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? T: I think a more relevant question to our experience is ‘what is it in interdisciplinary art practice that marginalised groups in society can engage with or appeal to?’ Already is the act of artmaking subversive when produced by women and other marginalised groups in society because art production, in its most traditional sense, has been historically neglected and made unavailable to these groups. It becomes, then, a natural course to turn over to non-traditional, processoriented, collaborative and interdisciplinary practices because these represent uncharted territories; there are fewer rules, the possibilities are endless and ‘unwritten’. As a queer, immigrant, woman of colour, I think it is important to acknowledge that some stories cannot be told by a single end-product, whether this is a painting, a video or a photograph, but that there is a unique richness and healing in the process of their making, in the dialogue that interdisciplinary collaboration can foster, in the simple act of human interaction and in the power of experimentation. M: Another thing to remember is that women are up against a whole host of expectations, (both conscious and implicit) and warped perceptions to begin

with. Work which might be considered ‘uncommon’ coming from female artists may not be questioned when coming from male artists. T: All of this, comes along with challenges when we are met with a system that does not yet respond to these ‘hybrid art domains’ in the same way as they do to more traditional fields, the art grant system being a good example. I think labeling work as unconventional really depends on which lens you are viewing it from. We

using a medium traditionally associated

to a clearly defined art discipline and playing around with its margins, which is an obvious departure from convention. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Michaela and Tracy. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? T:

was a really good place to start asking ourselves

questions from. There are so many aspects of our work that we want to keep exploring but that only emerged once we were in the editing process -themes or imagery that we hadn’t planned but that we both found a common interest in. There is only so much you can unpack with a 10 minute long video piece. I think there is a really beautiful and genuine interest in each others’ fields, Michaela’s in video and mine in dance and this is exciting for me. It makes for our roles to be ever-changing and developing in different directions. M: At the moment we are living in different cities, which makes collaboration less feasible, but we have some future plans to meet in residency for a new project. Another question we’re working with is the potential presentation formats for our work and research. Whereas our work is not quite videodance, not quite cinema, we’re interested in installation as a way to frame it, and highlight the spatial, sensorial nuances in that way. We both come from a live performance background, so it would be nice to return to that sensibility in some ways.

interview

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers meets

Robin Bisio Lives and works in Santa Barbara, California, USA

I have always been drawn to nature as a setting for my films with dance that reflects and reacts to certain landscapes. In this time of climate change when our lands and seas are in peril, films that showcase and honor the earth return us to the primary and early focus of dance: celebration and reflection of planetary design. With film, I hope to bring the audience directly into landscape through visceral movement. With a freedom of expression that belies creation in a studio, my desire is to present dancers as living actors within the natural world and not as a dominant force with dominion over nature. Listening and crafting movements as site specific, the dance that emerges is a kind of timeless prayer.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

would start this interview with a couple of questions regarding your background. You

and Dora S. Tennant

have a solid formal training and besides your

womencinemaker@berlin.com

background in dance you also studied at the Hello Robin and welcome to WomenCinemakers:

Sorbonne, UCSB and UC Berkeley where you

we would like to invite our readers to visit

earned your M.A. in English: how did these

in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we

experience influence of your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural

Women Cinemakers substratum due direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Here is some background on how I have combined dance and my English degree. I wrote this entry for a dance blog on my websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;scroll down to Root Causes/Words from Oct 1, 2012 http://robinbisiodance.com/blog?page=17 I come from a background of a close study of the structure of the novel which I studied at UC Berkeley under Professor Ralph Rader who was a leading neo- Aristotelian theorist. I wrote my thesis under his guidance. All the while I was taking dance classes, I was studying the formal measures of how a novel affects its audience based on its internal and individual principles. Somehow when I was finished with graduate school I felt ready and prepared to begin my choreographic research. I have studied with many dance teachers, choreographers and somatic practitioners but my study of literature was primary. I had the choice to go to graduate school in both Dance and English Literature and I choose English. I did not want academia to affect my artistic choices.

Women Cinemakers My cultural substratum has and always will be poetry. I base much of my work as a reflection and honoring of poetic text. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Aphrodite's Wave, an extremely interesting dance short film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/204569965. What has at once captured our attention of this stimulating work is the way it examines the relationship between body and space, to blend the artificial boundary between humans and Nature: while walking our readers through the genesis of Aphrodite's Wave, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? Aphroditeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wave is a love letter to the poetry of Sappho and the Pacific Ocean. I live across the street from the beach where we filmed Aphroditeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wave.I have created a body of work that addresses the relationship of dancer to sea with kinetic flow of movement linked to oceanic landscape as a guiding principle and metaphor for creation. Aphrodite is the goddess in Greek ocean creation myths. I am always inspired by images of Classical Greek dance on ancient artifacts and statues. The

Women Cinemakers

summer we filmed was an El NiĂąo which meant the sea was warm and inviting. The two dancers were very timeless in both jumps and runs and repose, like nymphs or seahorses or leaping dolphins straight out of Minoan art. Working with them inspired the movement choices I made.

particularly appreciated the way your sapient use of close ups allows you to capture emotionally charged moments: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens and how was the filming experience?

Featuring ravishing and elegant cinematography by Nik Blaskovich, Aphrodite's Wave is brilliantly composed and we have

For Aphroditeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wave, cinematographer Nik Blaskovich employed a Sony Action Cam waterproof camera with a fixed eye lens for the

Women Cinemakers

sand and underwater sequences. For the duet sequences on the beach, he went with his Panasonic LUMIX GH3 with a vintage Nikon 50mmf1.4 lens and an Olympus 9-18mm ultra wide lens. Nik has a poetic eye and a wide range of ever present lenses in his backpack. His choices are paramount but we always discuss range, angle and camera speed and generally go over the

dance sequences so he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get hit by the dancers. We have worked together for many years. His appreciation for the luminosity of dance and landscape and their relationship to each other enables him to capture an intimate artistry on the screen where the dancers are a very part of the landscape and not visiting actors on site. The otherworldly bleached out look for the duet was Nikâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s idea. It was a brave one as the sunset

Women Cinemakers that evening was a very beautiful blue pink and maybe the obvious choice. That wavering white light gave the film a time out of time feeling. Nik shot the underwater sections blind without a monitor. The action was so far out to sea that my directions were basically lost in the wind. The water sections were extremely of the moment. It helps that the dancers grew up in Santa Barbara and let the sea carry them and speak to them. The balmy weather and relatively high water temperature all added to a naturalistic quality as everyone was very comfortable in the environment that could have been cold and windy. We have appreciated the way your approach to performance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? I always work with directed and choreographed movement as a basis for my dance films.Still, I want the movement to look entirely natural and created in the moment by the dancer and not by an outside force.

Women Cinemakers On site (say for Aphroditeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wave with shifting sands, encroaching waves, and beach goers as audience) the dancers obviously had to improvise. I encourage freedom of expression between the dancers and the cinematographer which seems to enhance a true emotional and physical response to the environment. The theme of landscape is particularly important in your approach and as you have remarked in your artist's statement, your desire is to present dancers as living actors within the natural world and not as a dominant force with dominion over nature. Using a naturalistic veritĂŠ style and well orchestrated camera work, Aphrodite's Wave has drawn heavily from the specifics of its environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful resonance between the environment and performative gestures: how did you select the location and how did it affect your shooting process? I worked with a group of dancers to create a site specific dance at the beach. Two of the dancers, Carisa Carroll and Natalia Perea, were so beautiful that I wanted to film them. And Blake Bainou, our film composer, also played live for the site dance. His music bewitches. At high tide, the sea at by the cliffs looks untouched by modernity. It is also my personal habitat. I walk there often.

Women Cinemakers We filmed three half day shoots with the underwater shoots on different days. We shot the duet first. I made sure to capture that flooded look along the coast but we did have trouble with some insistent boogie boarders who keep running into our shots to catch the perfect rush of water. Nik had to dodge paddle boarders in the surf line. You just have to wait for people and dogs to pass and go for it. Sound plays an important role in your work and we have appreciated the way the minimalistic soundtrack by Blake Bainou provides Aphrodite's Wave with such an ethereal atmosphere and as well as the way you have sapiently structured the combination between performance gestures and sound: how do you see the relationship between sound and movement? Nik Blaskovich was the sound editor. He mixed sounds of the sea with Blake Bainou’s score for violin and voice. The addition of ambient sound to Blake’s music creates an ethereal atmosphere. The whistling helps too. I work with sound differently for each film but generally commission a score. In the case of Aphrodite’s Wave, Nik did his edit based on the existing score by Blake. However, often the composer creates the score based on edited material.

A still from

Women Cinemakers

I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work with sound in the studio or on set. Like the famous Merce Cunningham dictum, I believe dance and sound are two different worlds that come together in surprising ways. Another interesting work that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled What Green Altar, that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/223403194: we have been highly fascinated with the way you combine naturalistic realism of Ganna Walka Lotusland gardens in Santa Barbara and dreamlike atmosphere to explore the interstitial point between our inner landscapes and outside reality: we daresay that you seem to urge your spectatorship to challenge their perceptual categories to create personal narratives: how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? There is nothing more important than to trigger the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination and associations. I tend to not be didactic but embue my own mythology in almost every gesture and aspect of my films. However, the goal is to entice the viewer to create a space where

Women Cinemakers

the world they see is the world they create. In this way art has a life of its own. What Green Altar seems to develop a dialogue between Nature and human body: many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? As a choreographer who listens to nature as muse and guide and who sets her work directly in nature, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think I have the usual divide between concept and actualization. The doing becomes the being as ideas become inherently physical. There is immediate dialogue: a line between ideas and nature does not exist in the moment of dancing. It's no doubt that collaborations as the ones that you establehd over the years with Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks in Sensory Awareness and with Joan Chodorow in

Women Cinemakers

Authentic Movement are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields meet and collaborate on a project: could you tell us something about the collaborative nature of your iperformances and site-specific events? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines? Dance and dance films are inherently collaborative processes; for that I am very glad. I spend a lot of time as it is by myself in nature and in my studio and welcome the company. When I work with dancers and crew, there is a blending of talents. When you honor the sanctity and vision of the artists you work with, better art emerges: sometimes we surprise ourselves with something that is beyond our imagination. My goal is that we are all our best selves. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is

Women Cinemakers changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? There is a freedom and a kind of despair in being an unconventional person and artist. When freedom wings its way to vision, there is a wisdom in understanding your art. And there is truly nothing more fulfilling than that sense of accomplishment in creating art that moves others as it moves you. However, you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t escape the periodic despair that can arise on an individualistic path. It is generally a dusty and bumpy road without a destination. Modern dance is truly a womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s field from Isadora Duncan to Martha Graham to Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown and on into the future. It is feminine from training ground to choreography and performanceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; film not so much. My view of the future is women know how to lead, encourage, be inclusive and work with others. I see my field of dance art films as a beacon of hope. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Robin. Finally, would you like

Women Cinemakers to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Here is an article by Jacki Apple that describes my latest collaboration with Ethan Turpin and producer Lamara Heartwell, Entangled Waters. When Trump got elected, we all decided to be more direct mixing environmental politics and art:

This same group just shot a dance film in the burn zone in Santa Barbara which has been hit by fire and mudslides in a way that has made many in our community climate refugees. We hope our art openly offers encouragement for planetary stewardship. I just finished a new dance film with Nik Blaskovich which we again filmed at Ganna Walska Lotusland, this time with dancer Stephanie Miracle who works often in Germany. Our film, Waltz of Half Dreams, will be released soon and features Nikâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trippy look at dance in the garden. I wish I could represent our films in person at various film fests in beautiful places like the Adriatic Sea and Croatia this summer.

Women Cinemakers meets

Layla Mrozowski Matilda Cobanli Two women dance together on a busy cycling street in Vancouver, British Columbia.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

does the difference between your cultural

and Dora S. Tennant

substratums address your artistic research?

womencinemaker@berlin.com Hello Layla and Matilda and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions

We have a shared memory of standing in the Pacific ocean, wearing just our bathing suit bottoms, sunglasses, and lipstick ---- we were talking about dance and eating chips ---- four years ago in September.

regarding your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence your

For this special edition of

evolution as artists and creatives? Moreover, how

we have selected

, an extremely

interesting dance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article nd that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/1KU_TR-pjjQ. What has at once impressed us of your insightful inquiry into the relationship between human body and its surroundng is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such captivating aesthetics: when walking our readers through the genesis of

, would you tell us how

did you develop the initial idea? We were working with Swedish choreographer Emmalena Fredriksson whose artistic research at that time was exploring ‘faking’ others: embodying another dancer improvisationally. M: I really enjoyed Matilda doing Layla. There are certain people that we love to channel. L: I think you and I like to channel one another. There's something really comfortable about it, something really pleasurable. It’s both you and not you. And that’s where this work started: in dance, as a duet. We have appreciated the way your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects

interview

Women Cinemakers

interview

Women Cinemakers rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? The work started out as a unison duet. There are a lot of non unison moments in the film that are technically ‘fuck-ups.’ The choreographic material was fixed compositionally, but we hadn't rehearsed it together very much before filming. We were not precious with our choices- we followed an intuition in our shared aesthetics--- and our shared desire to not do fouettés, pirouettes, and splits. There’s a whole section in the duet where we just say "cool moves" ---- those were intended to be place holders for future as-of-yetundetermined movement material that we never got around to making---- so that moment was always improvised as a mark. ‘Marking’ is what dancers do to save their energy or muscles from doing a particularly challenging action. An easier or less energetic action is done in place of the actual movement. Tap, tap, tap: here’s my triple pirouette, imagine it.

Featuring refined and well-orchestrated camera

rather than a state of becoming. We are interested in

work by Jacob Raeder,

involves

dancing as a state of thinking. In the duet there was

the audience into heightened visual experience:

an imperative to be specific without being precious,

what were your aesthetic decisions when

to follow desire. Each of us can be very particular

conceiving this stimulating work?

about minutia, and that becomes very funny. We all share a playfulness, and everyone was given a lot of

We both love an absence of virtuosity with an

agency. Jacob works primarily in sculpture and

insistence on rigour. Virtuosity can make dance an

ceramics, but he has an ongoing relationship with

object: polished, unaffected by an audience, a thing

dance, and his cinematography evokes a particular

sensuality and curiosity that genuinely engages with

do you consider the relation between the

the dance on its own terms.

abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating

Many artists express the ideas that they explore

your artworks?

through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative

We we were not interested in controlling what the

processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter

finished piece looked like. Instead, we invited other

once underlined that "it is always only a matter

collaborators into our process (Jacob, as a camera

of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how

operator, and Alex, as an editor). We wanted our

Women Cinemakers choreographic methodology (a series of

There is a desire to embody the other person.

propositions that either get used or not, building on what came previously) to be consistent. You could try this… or not. Knowing that we were working on a duet that would ultimately exist as a film, we weren’t busy with things that we would usually be busy with (such as spatial relationships). There are moments when we simply swapped places- and those ended up being moments that Alex chose to use in the final edit: little moments of readjusting or messing up timing. The mechanism of the dance (and dance

L: You make a dance and it’s great and funny and I want to learn it. I want to try it on and by doing so make it mine, because then it's in me, but not in a way that takes it away from you, but that expands my sense of self --- for our boundaries to go like this [moves fingers together in wave motion]. And that collaborative process works because it's a two way flow. Our collaborative process feels generous, matter-of-fact, and casual. Everything is a proposition. The whole process feels very porous.

filmmaking) was exposed, which includes the lapses

M: It's interesting that each of us has 4 or 5 things

in memory, the squinting in the sun, the walking and

that are very specific, and then everything else is "do

talking in between dancing.

what you feel.” The choices are always odd, or

It's no doubt that collaborations as the one that you have established over the years are today ever growing forces in Contemporary scene and

idiosyncratic. A wrist leading a turn and eye focus will matter immensely, but the actual turn and body mechanics are of no concern.

that the most exciting things happen when

Marked out with minimalistic and at the same

creative minds from different fields meet and

time refined visual qualities,

collaborate on a project: could you tell us

seems to respond to German photographer

something about the collaborative nature of

Andreas Gursky's take, when he stated that Art

your work? Can you explain how your work

should not be delivering a report on reality, but

demonstrates communication between two

should be looking at what's behind something:

creative minds?

its essential still effective visual style provides

Women Cinemakers your performance with such emotional

project that explores social choreography and

intensity: what are were aiming to provoke in

collective rhythm in city spaces. We were dancing

the viewers? And what do you hope the

in public and looking at bodies in the city often,

spectators take away from your La Casa Gelato?

and the bubble gum pink walls of La Casa Gelato are incredibly striking. The pink wall felt really

We feel that art ----particularly performance--exists somewhere in between what a maker intends and an audience perceives, and so we don't have expectations for spectators in that way. Rather, there is an inviting into this particular thing- this dance, this place, these people, this moment. We wanted to make a film that felt more like dance than film. has drawn heavily from the

important, as did "golden hour"- but we didn't realize that golden hour was the worst time to film there. We decided to embrace it. During the shoot we were literally squinting. It was a Thursday during rush hour, so many people were cycling on their commute home and the street was very busy. People stopped to watch us for a bit, to ask what we were doing. There are different social contracts enacted when experiencing dance in a theater. By

minimalistic specifics of urban environment and

performing dance in the world, casually, people

we have highly appreciated the way you have

encounter it in a way that they aren't expecting it

created such insightful resonance between

---- it's there and if they want to engage with it, it

space and movement: how did you select the

interrupts their routines.

location and how did it affect your

Performance activates spaces in such a particular

performance?

way. That pink wall is now forever this work for us.

At that time we were quite busy with thinking

Before leaving this conversation we want to

about public space in Vancouver because we were

catch this occasion to ask you to express your

also then working on WATERFALL FALLING

view on the future of women in contemporary

FOREVER AGAIN, a post-internet dance media

art scene. For more than half a century women

have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? We're meeting right now, discussing these interview questions at CURRENT, a Feminist Electronic Art Symposium in Vancouver. Their tag line is “dream of a new future”. We're in it and we're seeing it and we're a part of this group of queer ++++ women and non binary folks who are making things that deal with a physical practice but also some sort of virtual or electronic practice. It’s a coincidence that we’re both in Vancouver right now talking, as neither of us live in British Columbia anymore and that film was made right before we both left. Matilda is dividing her time between Austria and Belgium, Layla is based in Philadelphia, and we both just happen to be here now to discuss this work. Layla is here working on a project with Justine Chambers, an artist and badass woman making vibrant, vital choreographic work. We know so many women in the contemporary dance scene in Vancouver who are

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers doing good work, and we have found different ways to be happily involved from the distances and proximities in which we find ourselves. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Layla and Matilda. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? L: Last year I was invited to perform at Sawdust Collector, an interdisciplinary bi-weekly performance series at The Gold Saucer in Vancouver. One of the curators knew I was going to be in the city for an artist residency. Matilda and I had been talking about a solo she was working on that repurposed some of the movement material from this project, and I asked if I could learn it and perform it at Sawdust Collector. At the time I was reading a book about Black Quantum Futurism and I was really interested in the notion of time folding. Matilda was going to be in Vancouver one month later, and because the previous version of the solo had been a duet, I loved the idea of us having a duet that had a month long intermission. So I performed Matildaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solo in June, and she performed it in July, but we talked about it and presented it as a duet. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something cheeky about presenting our

work in this way that feels in line with the work itself. M: I made the solo for a theater because that was the framework through which it had to be performed at SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance), but I was performing it in semi private or private performances for people- like in parking lots and change rooms and in the bathroom. I performed it in different stages of readiness for different people in these semi public/semi intimate spaces. L: I performed the duet at an after hours party for a friend who hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t made it to the Gold Saucer. It was summer, we were standing outside of the party, in an industrial area of the city, talking about the piece. So I performed it right there, in the middle of the street. I loved that context because there's something that feels really good about it being in semi public space. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re both keen on having these short dances in our pockets that can be performed at any time, in different stages of completion. And we're interested in virtual collaboration, continuing to work across oceans. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

interview

Women Cinemakers

Women Cinemakers meets

Michelle Ordorica Lives and works in Mexico

Obra Negra is a captivating dance short film by Michelle Ordorica: featuring unconventional and brilliant choreography, this stimulating work is a successful attempt to create a brilliant allegory of human condition capable of drawing the viewers to a heightened and multilayered experience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to this stimulating work of art and to Ordorica's artistic production.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Michelle and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influenced your evolution as an artist? Moreover, does your cultural background direct your artistic research? My own background definitely has been crucial in the construction of my artistic production, in the context

that I grew up, the body and specifically the female body is conditioned and directly affected by violence. I´m talking about how there could be a way of tracing violence within the observation of the transformation of a body under a neoliberal system and necropolitical influence. A body most likely to be abducted ¿which are the traces in the flesh? and I´m not talking about the typical portrait of a body under violent circumstances, but more like the potential creation of an archive that dwells in the body. Since I was at university though painting I was exploring violence but I couldn’t really understand the mechanisms within it. I always had a very obscure style and that obscurity was something I was

portraying almost subconsciously about the subjects I am interested about. Working with violence, as I see it has to do with so many things; for instance, language itself or even self inflicted pain. But I also do not try to pragmatize it and see the face of the other. I can say that my work is still a work in process . Do you think that there is any central idea that connects all of your work as an artist? The wounds without body is one of the projects where I have been doing lots of experimentation. I am interested in how bodies could be taken to certains limits or impossibilities, through video and photography I explore in first hand how they could react to certains environments, mostly violent environments. My body of work has similarities in the form, I create very obscure atmospheres where the object/ character is already inhabit by that obscurity . By obscurity i mean something impenetrable and mysterious. Being able to create spaces of respiration and sensuality, as if the reminder of itÂ´s own extirpated interpretation violently calls for the demands of the space. For me body language and gestures are very important. I truly believe that le geste dominĂŠ la

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Women Cinemakers

A still from OBRA NEGRA

A still from

Women Cinemakers

A still from OBRA NEGRA

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Women Cinemakers pensée. The violence of the language I employ relies to the psyche and physical movement of each one of my case of study or characters. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected OBRA NEGRA, an extremely interesting video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/184070171. What has at once captured our attention of your work is the way approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language, providing the viewers combined with such a captivating visual experience. When walking our readers through the genesis of OBRA NEGRA, would you tell us how did you develope the initial idea? Obra negra, talks about an archive, an archive that inhabits a body and a certain architecture of the ruin. I wonder if it´s possible to go the past and ask the ruin, a broken wall, a lost body some questions. The temporality in the video talks about the possibility to glimpse a past that is located in the future. It´s not that important to define who owns the body, or where is it, I know for sure, somewhere in the third world, a world, that maybe just for a moment I can control. My function as the author is to be a medium; being able to invoke a certain body with some traces that could predict

A still from OBRA NEGRA

something, maybe not the future, it walks towards a historiography written in a body that crawls the ruins of a promise of the state that announced modernity and pledged for a future that never arrived. I do not articulate myself as a so called â&#x20AC;&#x153;political artistâ&#x20AC;? I do think that all the personal affairs are indeed political, so definitely IÂ´m thinking to portray a body with certain characteristics that talk about a corporeal status in a context that I find familiar. There is a constant menace or maybe a daily reminder

that the bodies that I can identify will never be found, they could be abducted by the State, by neoliberalism, by a mode of production that just devours the body. Obra negra in a literal translation means black construction site, it means that something is in a raw phase, not finished, that shows the inner structure of a building, and maybe a body as well. Featuring essential cinematographic style with well orchestrated camera work, OBRA NEGRA has drawn heavily from the specifics of its

environment and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful resonance between the environment and the movement of human body: how was your creative and shooting and performative process affected by locations? Obra negra which is the name used to call a phase in which the land is adapted for the construction is a neutral and indefinite structure, whose content, and therefore, its meaning, is not yet legible.

I found it necessary to shoot there, it was very natural and obvious that i wanted that specific space. Even if , It was very hard to shoot because we did it illegally. My crew was quite small and we did entered that black construction by climbing until getting there, it is interesting to know that, the place we saw being constructed now is a immense liquor shop. Location did not affect the performative process because I told Ricardo I wanted him to be part of the space, not a body that is superimposed but one that mimics with their surroundings.

A still from OBRA NEGRA

Featuring essential and well-orchestrated choreography OBRA NEGRA involves the audience in a dreamlike and heightened visual experience: what were your aesthetic decisions when conceiving this stimulating work? In particular, were you interested in providing your performance with an allegorical quality that reflect human condition? I was inspired by butoh dance , the dance that cherish and reminds us of the dead. The choreography was thought but I told Ricardo that it was a dance by his own , I mean, he was the body that was in that specific time and space and even though I was the director I couldn’t possessed that body we created. Furthermore he wasn’t even the person who possessed it. Going back to my cultural heritage as a Mexican woman I cannot be moved or touched (no podría no estar ) by our current history. Bodies that are taken as objects and at the end they could disappear without any trace, the space itself give us this trace, the print of something that existed. Sound plays an important role in your video and we have appreciated the way the sound tapestry by Sebastia n Blendl provides OBRA NEGRA with such an ethereal atmosphere as well as the way you have sapiently structured the combination between performance gestures and sound: how

interview

Women Cinemakers

A still from OBRA NEGRA

Women Cinemakers

A still from OBRA NEGRA

interview

Women Cinemakers

do you see the relationship between sound and movement? The sound begins with the intention of questioning the viewer about the context in which the performance is occurring, suggesting a critical environment. The entity body language turns out to be soft but visually aggressive, interrupted abruptly by sudden agitations. The docile part of the performance is supported by constant sounds with almost psychodelic textures while the second part rests on a drum and bass part with unstable rhythms. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? I think we are still being overshadowed by a power that can be masculine or hierarchical. In my personal experience I had encounter very

A still from OBRA NEGRA

Women Cinemakers sensible men and women that thinks art is not about gender or subject but mostly about the impact on our society or a small group of people. How I see the future? I see that there's a vast and incredible women production nowadays, we need to help each other to have more visibility and women to speak out their truths. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Michelle. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Since last year Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been working on a documentary film directed by Francisco Viveros about the postwar period of the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 80s, this story is told from the point of view of a family that was involved in the conflict. Although with the current political situation we have been re-working the final cut. I am also working in my first film called LAPSUS which is a film essay which creates a thin line between the real and the fictional; where doubt, contradiction and memory play a fundamental role in defining love. You can see my work on Instagram: alma_films_and_music. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

A still from OBRA NEGRA

Women Cinemakers meets

Sonia Sabri Lives and works in Birmingham, UK and works Across the globe We see Nu Body as a significant contribution to the world of women and film, women and dance, women and digital media, and women and critical thought. In the postmodern climate in which borders and boundaries are continuously shifting and even appearing to diminish at times, there emerges a series of significant questions concerning the identity of the female subject/object. Concept artist, film director and producer, co-writer, choreographer and dancer Sonia Sabri places the female mind and body at the heart of her urban Kathak and spoken word articulation. Through the themes of light and dark, the real and the imagined, the masculine and the feminine, Sabri questions who owns and controls the female? What is the significance of her cerebral and corporeal existence? Can she exist on her own without the impositions and governance of male authority? What is the world teaching our daughters? Why are so many daughters being buried and silenced before they even get an opportunity to live? Nu Body also focuses on the importance of the colour â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;redâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as this is often visible in the many customs and traditions of South Asia. It is the use of this colour that often signifies a girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of worth in connection with her moving from childhood into womanhood. In addition, Sabri also gives thanks to those women that have paved the way for liberation and empowerment; that is both famous figures as well as our own family members. However, Nu Body also reminds the contemporary woman that her journey has only just begun.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier

production we would like to invite our readers

and Dora S. Tennant

to visit http://ssco.org.uk in order to get a wide

womencinemaker@berlin.com

idea about your artistic production and we

Hello Sonia and welcome to before starting to elaborate about your artistic

would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background: are there any

Photo by Simon Richardson

Women Cinemakers experiences that did particularly influence your artistic research? In particular, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of your artistic research? At Sonia Sabri Company we endeavour to present the North Indian classical dance style of Kathak as a progressive art discipline. As the Artistic Director, choreographer and dancer, the creative intentions behind my modernization of Kathak are rooted in my belief that society is constantly changing and evolving. As a result of these alterations, Kathak must also advance in its grammar and vocabulary. The Kathak dancer possesses the quality to transcend the audience into a different place through the means of escapism from the real world as well as being able to exhibit and appreciate the beauty of life given by God. This celebration of the gifted person -- the artist -- is associated as a gift from God and the skills that the solo Kathak performer illustrates is also to some extent blessings from the Divine. I mention the importance of the spiritual connection between the dancer and the Creator as the daily lives of many people of the Indian sub-continent are embedded within the religious and devout values of faith. Even though there is a belief in God at the same time there is a continual search for further experiences that permit the individual to celebrate and immerse oneself in that belief, that is to say, to be in close proximity

Women

and intimacy with the Divine. This search, this desire Cinemak is displayed through numerous means, ways but primarily through the disciplines of both dance and music. Dance has become the medium through which an audience can encounter something greater than themselves and that which has a spiritual as well as an emotional encounter. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Nu Body, an extremely interesting documentary project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once impressed of your insightful exploration of women's identity in our unstable contemporary age is the way it provides the viewers with a multilayered visual experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of Nu Body, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? When I had my first child, a woman asked me the sex of the baby. When I explained that I had given birth to a girl, the woman stated “Oh, never mind” and then continued to inform me that I had “been blessed with two boys.” This played on my mind for a while, as it was the first time I had experienced this action of unfairly criticising the female to her face. Not quite understanding or getting to grips with the notion of favouring the male species over the

female, I also heard a lot about female foeticide that was meets

occurring not only in the Indian subcontinent but also in places as close to home as Birmingham. The fact that this was happening on my doorstep right here in the UK shocked me and after reading an article in 2016 based on the subject of female foeticide this simply made me feel very angry. It began to make me think and question the representation and misrepresentation of the girl, the woman, the daughter, the sister, the mother, the aunt, the grandmother, in both the realms of the East and the West. Since 2010, Sonia Sabri Company have been involved in and have participated in outreach work and projects with numerous women’s groups and over the years, much of the research and outcome of these activities has fed into the production of Nu Body. One of these earlier projects was called Khoj, meaning ‘to search’ in 2010. Khoj comprised of a series of workshops for the Women’s Networking Hub in Birmingham. On first being introduced to this group of women many of them showed signs of insecurity. They appeared anxious, lacked the confidence to speak and seemed voiceless and afraid. So it was vital to build a sense of trust in these women to help free their ‘hidden’ voice. These people need a voice. Others need to be aware that there are women in society that are struggling and experiencing so many ‘silent’ challenges and yet so many of us have no clue about them. Their ‘hidden’ stories can in fact empower others.

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Women Cinemakers

Photo by Sarvar Sabri

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers

This was one of the first outreach projects that allowed me to work with women who were experiencing issues associated with mental health. The participants hidden voices and narratives were eventually expressed through the mediums of dance, drama and physical theatre and this experience fed into the themes expressed in Nu Body We have appreciated the way you have provided your experimental film with such a poetic quality, capable of establishing emotional involvement in the viewers: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting and what did you aim to trigger in the spectatorship? Kathak uses storytelling and has an intricate vocabulary along with geometrical choreography and it takes years of training and dedicated learning to develop the art of mine and facial expression to tell a story and evoke an emotion or mood or story without using words. At Sonia Sabri Company we have used this practice on all of our contemporary settings by using and subverting the traditional storytelling of Kathak. With Nu body we wanted to use a more naturalistic style and of all the classical dance forms, Kathak and mime lends itself more easily to a more realistic art form. We very much wanted to show some kind of a journey of a woman but not in a linear fashion, provoking an idea of whether the obstacles that women face have

Still from Nu body

evolved and changed over time. We were very lucky in gaining access to a mortuary underground a City Council building that is not open to the public as it is dangerous and not safe to visit. After a great deal of pleading we were able to secure two hours of filming. We felt very strongly that we wanted to use this location as we felt that the mortuary had a strong resonance with the themes of the film. The mortuary had been used as a dumping ground for bodies after the first and second world wars especially for women and children. Very little care or attention was given to the bodies and they were abandoned and neglected in the mortuary. We wanted to reflect the aura and ambience of the setting and the unease and haunting atmosphere that we felt whilst filming and this very much comes across in the film. The director was able to capture a shaft of light cutting through the gloom representing change, faith and hope for the future. We wanted the film to be abstract, without specifying exactly who the woman is and removing the linear narrative structure. The second half of the film is set in a white space representing purity and innocence. It is an unconditional, unscarred place and juxtaposing this with the symbolism of the colour red worked particularly well against the white background. How would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of a scene and

interview

Women Cinemakers

Still from Nu body

Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your artistic production? In developing Nu Body, the music came first and we wanted to highlight the emotional journey through a non-linear narrative using non-traditional Indian music. We wanted the music to be timeless, not from any particular genre or time period. Once we had started the soundscape I was able to improvise the choreography. The Director Mathew Beckett was keen to play around with the idea of everything not looking as it seems and teasing the audience with what could or could or could not be seen, We improvised around changing the audiences perspectives with what was visible and using props to enhance this theme. We then created a storyboard and rehearsed the storyboard in a studio before shooting the film. There were then some elements of improvisation ensuring that the storyboard translated accurately in front of the camera. Nu Body sapiently draws the viewers through a multilayered journey in the liminal area where the real and the imagined find consistent points of convergence: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing with in your artistic practice? Nu body is a stand-alone work that depicts the ongoing female struggle and redefines the more traditional Kathak style of dance to give an urban futuristic edge to a story of womanhood. Its themes resonate through the ages with significance for women

Still from Nu body

Women Cinemakers and girls around the world. The solo performance explores themes such as the transition from child to woman and the constraints facing women around the world. Using exquisite storytelling with just body movements and facial expressions I hope to explore various ways in which society seeks to marginalise women and girls. The simplicity of the setting is there to magnify the themes and the haunting background music aims to add a deeper layer of intensity to the piece. We dare say that your film could be considered a coming-of-age allegory: as you have remarked once, Nu Body also focuses on the importance of the colour ‘red’ as this is often visible in the many customs and traditions of South Asia. It is the use of this colour that often signifies a girl’s sense of worth in connection with her moving from childhood into womanhood. Could you elaborate a bit about this aspect of your video? The symbolism and colour red is significant within particularly eastern traditions and customs that claim to define the worth of a girl into womanhood. Imagery plays with versions of reality and fantasy, exploring the idea that our own realities and truths are informed by our genders. Women have climbed mountains through centuries of oppression. Whilst remembering and giving thanks to the women - both famous figures and our own family members - who have paved the way for the more equal society in

which we live today, ‘Nu Body’ glimpses the injustices still facing ‘the fairer sex’. 'I may break, again and again But every-time I shall rise from that very ground Like dust clinch spec to spec Chanting a whisper “build the broken” I am what you do not see. I am what you do not see.' The way you have sapiently combined your exploration of the relationship between sound and the grammar of body language provides Nu Body with such an ethereal atmosphere: how do you see the relationship between sound and movement? We felt that it was important to use the relationship of the traditions of Kathak dance and music working together in conversation whilst subtly subverting the genre. We decided not to use Tabla, which is usually integral to Kathak. We wanted to avoid a percussive melody and wanted the soundscape to reflect the rhythm of breathing. We wanted to use the feeling when we breathe, and portray the differences in breath when you are calm versus when you are afraid and using the sound of movement and the heartbeat. The Musical Director Sarvar Sabri worked in collaboration with Alvin Davis a saxophonist to move away from the traditional and use the sound of struck keys and controlled breath suggesting a hint of

Photo by Roy Peters

Still from Nu body

Women Cinemakers sound to add to the haunting ambience of the soundscape. We were also influenced by a documentary we watched on whales and the eerie and evocative sound of a mother whale calling out to her lost calf. This sound was reproduced on the saxophone in the latter half of the film with hints of melody representing the lack of resolution. It was integral to the film that the music was non classical and not traditional to complement the choreography and themes We have particularly appreciated the way you have elegantly conveyed such subtle socio political criticism about the imposition and governance of male authority on women in our male oriented societies: does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? In particular, do you think that your being a woman provides your artistic research with some special value? In the postmodern climate in which borders and boundaries are continuously shifting and even appearing to diminish at times, there emerges a series of significant and critical questions concerning the identity of the female subject/object. I have placed the female mind and body at the heart of this contemporary articulation. Through the themes of light and dark, the real and the imagined, the masculine and the feminine I question who owns and controls the female? What is the

Still from Nu body

Women Cinemakers significance of her cerebral and corporeal existence? Can she exist on her own accord without the impositions and governance of male authority? Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? My personal experience has been similar and continues to be in certain situations that being a young woman, and that of Asian origin who does not do â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;western contemporary dance techniqueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; has had an impact on the opportunities that have come my way or rather lack of. It continues to be a constant battle in carving a space for oneself and to earn the appreciation and respect of my art and my status as an artist. Having said this, it is becoming better through regular discourse around the issue. The dance sector or at least the art of dance is traditionally viewed as a form presented by women however, the dance sector of today is steered by the male dancers and directors. Although statistically there are a lot more females than males in the sector, the ones who receive the prolific commissions and

opportunities are the male counterparts. Generally, there is greater press and media attention on the male and this disparity has dented the confidence of extremely talented female artists some of whom leave their artistic profession and others who settle for a compromised career. I feel women should execute their talent in whatever field they wish. No woman should feel afraid of trying new ideas, walk a new path, explore artistry with honesty and use to express that which words fail. Infact there is greater curiosity among people when she does the unthinkable! Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Sonia. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? As a company we are further developing the wellbeing of a person and exploring art as a way of healing the body, mind and spirit. We are also looking to produce more dialogues between film, live music and dance and producing dance for children and their families. Watch this space! An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Yerin Lee Lives and works in London, UK and Seoul, South Korea

Y Dance is a Korean Contemporary Dance Company, which is based in London, with 2 artists and an arts manager. We are based on traditional Korean dance and combine the dance with contemporary techniques. Y Dance preserves the value of traditional Korean performance that has been maintaining traditionally and reinterprets it with a modern edge to globalise traditional Korean dance. Y Dance have been creating various dance performances and films, such as “ : Soul” and “In Wonderland”, and also diverse dance programmes, such as workshop and dance busking to introduce Y Dance. These experiences make our own dance identity which can show both contemporary dance and Korean dance at the same time. Y Dance is focused on identifying the Korean contemporary dance as the most originality, creativity and universality movements among other dance performances. Also, we aim to show the possibility of Korean dance to collaborate with other arts and performances. As Y Dance artists feel pride themselves with traditional performance, we inosculate the past, present and future with our dance and performance.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello and welcome to : before starting to elabrate about your artistic production we would invite our readers to visit

and we would start this interview we would ask you a couple of question about your background: you have a solid training and after having earned your BA in Dance from the School of Dance, Kyung Hee University, you nurtured your education with an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship: Theatre and

Performance Pathway, that you received from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. How did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how do your direct the trajectory of your artistic research?

The most important value of art to me has always been "understanding" and "opportunity for thinking". Since childhood, I have focused on Korean traditional art and tried to understand the most basic ways of communication in it. In Gukak National High School (Art school for Korean traditional music and dance), I was able to explore the role and value that traditional arts have shown for a long time and trained my own dance. I can say that I made the root of my dance at this time. Afterwards, I found that 'dance' always felt difficult for people by having a conversation with them. Moreover, it seems that there is a stereotype of 'dance', which is always serious and difficult to understand, and I began to find a new way to change it. Whilst I was in Kyung Hee University, I understood the essential elements of the Korean traditional stage which dealt with real social problems, such as metal diseases and homosexuality, as demonstrated in dance works. All my dance works have always hoped that people could have different perspectives on what happens around them through art. Afterwards, I became interested in outdoor performance in order to interact with more audiences, and I was enacting a political performance, for a brief period, by improvisation movements and dance busking, as the leading member of non-profit organisation names UNENDING. In the meantime, I felt the necessity to

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers present it as a dance film on social media, the most significant source of communication. Therefore, I made dance films encompassing the national problems in South Korea, such as Mers disease and the Sewol Ferry Disaster in which the authorities were criticised for their handling of the tragedy, when the ferry sank, in order to reveal the seriousness of the situations and to inform people of their implications. After graduated Kyung Hee University, I went to Goldsmiths, University of London to study in â&#x20AC;&#x153;MA Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship: Theatre and Performance Pathwayâ&#x20AC;?. It was an excellent opportunity to make new things with my dance, such as introducing traditional Korean dance, creating the Korean contemporary dance company, and collaborating dance with design, visual and modern music. One of the biggest challenge and achievement is that I started a dance company, Y Dance, with other artists. Even though it is just a start-up dance company, Y Dance is trying to create a unique genre, called Korean Contemporary, combining Korean traditional dance and contemporary dance. Additionally, Y Dance is trying to establish and develop the identity of Y Dance, through critical thinking and diverse cultural experiences with the emotions, experiences and opinions of artists. From Korean traditional dance developed with the public as the starting point, my dance went into the greatest orbit, the publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arts, and now it is continuously running as the art to show our reality through various perspectives. From the moment I started my consideration about my own art, my thoughts are gradually expanding. I began with the words of people who simply say, 'Art is difficult', and I tried to remember

art as a record of the times. Finally, now I would like to provide opportunities to reconsider our lives through the arts.

provides the viewers with such an emotionally intense visual experience, enhanced by elegant composition. When walking our readers through

For this special edition of

of , would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea?

, a captivating dance film have selected that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article nd that can be viewed at . We have been fascinated with the way your insightful inquiry into in our media driven societies, is the way it

We often see people who are suffering from their own belief that life is beautiful. They are difficult people who complain about others, their situations and lives, hurting from a positive and beautiful world they have believed. I also might be involved in them. The beginning of '넋: Soul' was looking back on my past. ‘Neokduri (넋두리)’. It is a word of complaining with

dissatisfaction in Korean. In Korea, people frequently use the expression ‘to propitiate the soul’ or ‘to comfort

disappointment for oneself, and there are souls, called

the soul’. In the same vein, ‘Neokduri (넋두리)’ means to solve the grudge of the life on behalf of a dead soul. In modern times, it has become increasingly used to mean 'grumbling' in daily life to resolve the social pressures and problems.

number of ‘넋’ is increasing, and perhaps everyone,

Through these two meanings of 'Neokduri (넋두리)', I tried to represent the minds of all people living in this period. Everyone study, work and run for a better life. However, what is increasing is the pressure from others, the pessimism about society, and the

넋, that make the most extreme choice, suicide. The including myself, may become a potential ‘넋’, crossing the same bridge to the same choice. I have developed '넋: Soul' with Y Dance to show the voice of our heart shouting from somewhere deep. If Korean word, ‘Neokduri (넋두리)’ is the most traditional concept and the boundary between life and death, ‘넋: Soul' is the most realistic and candid film, standing at the border to represent our past and present.

Elegantly shot, features gorgeous combinations between refined cinematography by Coco Yeonsoo Do and Nuri Koh and a keen eye for when detail: what were your shooting? In particular, what was your choice about camera and lens?

There are two points that Y Dance focused on when shooting ‘넋: Soul’ Firstly, in ‘넋: Soul’, the perspective of the person, called 넋(Neok), who decides to commit suicide, coexists with another view of the person who looks at 넋. For instance, the feature of 넋 towards the most extreme choice, wearing a suit that symbolises the social pressures and stresses that people currently face, is generally seen through a fixed frame. This was to show how people are being pushed into the end, which means suicide, in the stereotypes of the world. Furthermore, various scenes, such as following up movements of the dancer, looking at a first-person narrative, and appearing in traditional clothes, described the person who has the unstable mind through looking at the root of 넋. Secondly, ‘넋: Soul’ look at the symbolic elements that mean suicide from the nearest place. The film looked at the essential elements, such as the feet of 넋 who is struggling with the line, the shoes and the black suit, and tried to emphasise the meaning they have by putting weight on the existence themselves rather than being expressed as movements.

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers

Symbols are particularly important in your artistic practice and it's important to remark that (Traditional Korean clothes) and (Modern clothes) symbolise the dancer’s soul and body, as well as, embody past and present, death and life. We have particularly appreciated the way you combine traditional Korean and contemporary dance: how do you consider the relationship between the cultural heritage due to your Korean roots and the contemporary sensitiveness that you had the chance to develop over the years? Moreover, do you think that there's a conflict or a synergy between tradition and contemporariness?

People think that there is a big gap between traditional and modern cultures, and it could be obvious in fact. Therefore, it is quite difficult to transcribe them into a single space, my dance. That is because it is 'different' in many ways, from visible differences, such as clothing, language and music, to differences in things that are deep into people, such as culture, thought and society. Furthermore, as "넋: Soul" included the speciality of Korean tradition as a representative of ‘tradition’, it was a considerable challenge to convey entirely the emotions that I felt from the tradition to the audience. However, tradition is always the perfect way to express the history, culture, and thoughts deeply in me. Basically, in Korean traditional arts, there are 'breathing' and 'line', and they harmonise well to form a single aura. In addition, when I put the meaning of life that I live now with modern sense or thought, the beautiful intersection of tradition and contemporary is completed. ‘넋: Soul’ also tried to convey the

Women Cinemakers value of the intersection. Y Dance and I believe that it is tradition to have the present state of the past and the future state of the present. Moreover, we would like to say that tradition and contemporary should be combined in order to point out the present life in its tradition and to touch deep into people’s hearts. It's no doubt that collaborations as the one that you have established together with the foundation are today ever growing forces in of contemporary scene and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, Peter Tabor once stated that " ": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between artists from different disciplines?

Collaboration with someone is exciting to work, but also a meticulous process. It is because we have to expose each other’s arts, as well as, to coexist with respect. That is why I agree with Peter Tabor. I have been collaborating with a variety of people, including visual artists, photographers, composers, poets with diverse backgrounds. However, I cannot say that I have always enjoyed it. It took me a long time to understand their arts, and the process of combining them and my art required considerable effort. This may be because the background is different, the language is

different, and the value of art that matters most is slightly different. However, one thing is clear: Collaboration is the most creative because it's different. Moreover, through this process, I get different perspectives, and this is the most significant advantage and gift that collaboration brings to me. Y Dance is a collaborative company where different artists try various works through choreography, fine art, video, lighting, music and filmmaking. However, Y Dance differs from other collaborations in that all of the participating artists have a similar background with the same language. All artists had a common language and culture, Korean, and be in a similar situation in which they live in London now. Therefore, we could share and feel the tradition and modernity, the Korean and the British, and the complicated emotions that we felt in them. Moreover, all of these feelings have been combined with current social problems, and works like "넋: Soul" came out. The artists are all focused on the biggest social problems of South Korea and the same issues we have with the present where we are. Through "넋: Soul", we have a common goal of representing the hearts of sufferers in society. The film started from the small but strong centre of ‘넋두리’, wrapping it up with artists’ own circles of music, choreography, costumes, and films, and now it became the artistic wave of Y Dance. Your artistic research is pervaded with insightful socio political criticism and as you have remark is about suffering the mental once,

A still from

Women Cinemakers anguish caused by life and death, living and committing. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, " How do you consider the role of artists and filmmakers in our unstable contemporary age? In particular, does your artistic research respond to cultural moment?

In fact, it is always difficult to argue about the social and political role of art. The main reason is that it seems a bit different from the autonomy, identity, and purity of art. However, these are not entirely different. If you look into a bit more, you can discuss social and political situations with art, because art has autonomy, identity and purity. From the past, art has reflected the history and has not hesitated to accuse and criticise the times. This kind of art has made a strong impression on me and has come to be the most attractive. However, I do not mean that art should always stand in the position of the weak to accuse and criticise. As I mentioned before, the most important value of art to me has always been "understanding" and "opportunity for thinking". Bertolt Brecht tried to show social causation through art and teach people 'intervention thinking'. Since I also believe this, the basic idea of all the activities that I have done was to â&#x20AC;&#x153;make time for people to think about current society through artâ&#x20AC;?. Therefore, even if the public understanding of my art is essential, my artistic works have highlighted symbolisation

and duplicity to derive the ‘intervention thinking’ from audiences, rather than showing through direct texts, images, and movements. All the dance performance and dance films I am doing are not merely criticising life and wanting to change it, but most importantly, it gives people time to think about their present life. Music plays a crucial role in your work and the with such a minimalistic sound tapestry provides both capable of challenging the viewers' perceptual categories: How do you consider the role of sound within your artistic research? Moreover, how do you consider playing within your work?

‘Performative gestures and sound’. They have not always maintained a consistent relationship. Sometimes music is a necessary condition for performative gestures, and occasionally performative gestures are a sufficient condition to satisfy the expression of music. However, it is evident that they are in an interdependent relationship continuously. The sound has a considerable weight in my works as well. Notably, a dance film shows a strong existence, which is to help the audience focus and understanding. The sound is more significant than we think when we see something. If a dancer makes the same movements through different music, the meaning of the movements is completely changed. In particular, in the dance film where has the lack of reality, the sound becomes a critical medium to convey the feeling of the scene. Surely, I respect the claim that if you concentrate too much on the sound, you may not be able to tell what you want to

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers do since your movement may be restricted. Therefore, when I create a work, understanding and interpretation of sound is a priority, and I can concentrate when it is in the same line with the story of the movement I want to do. I always research, explore, and study sounds that can be used to express what I want to convey. The music of “넋: Soul”, Arirang (lyrical folk song in the Republic of Korea), is a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. It contains hardships and aspirations of the nation, and joy and sorrow felt by the general public. It has been through the generations since the past and is now being reinterpreted from various genres and diverse people. In this sense, we tried to actualise the value of Arirang, such as joy and sorrow, suffering and aspiration, past and present, tradition and contemporary, and national and global, as the perfect sound of '넋: soul'. We have deeply appreciated the way features such captivating inquiry into the grammar of body to create a kind of involvement with the viewers that touches not only the emotional sphere, but also and especially the intellectual one, urging them to question also . Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that " ": how do you consider the relation between of the issues that you explore and of

Women Cinemakers creating your artworks?

Expressing thoughts with the body is a relatively simple process. The cry from the sincere heart comes out through the body, not the mouth, and we notice most of what they say at once. There is no need for complicated processes to express and understand movements. It is because the movements, the language of the body, is stronger and more straightforward than any other languages. That is why my works are like a well-structured speech that conveys and shares the words and feelings I want. All the abstract thoughts, which I have explored and considered, permeate everywhere in my life, and each sentence is passed in the language of the body. The most important thing here is 'exploration and consideration'. It is because I come through the last gate, understanding, through concentration and exploration, various perspectives and attempts, and many considerations until I figure my sides out from something. The production process of “넋: Soul” also had the longest time of 'exploration and consideration'. In addition, with the traditional concept of ‘넋(Soul)’, it was most important to understand the thoughts and feelings of people, who walked between life and death due to stress and social pressures. All the artists, who participated in the production, tried to sympathise with them and to show the coexistence of soul and body, suicide and life in the same movements, with the meaning of '넋두리'. The director wrote down everything we had explored, and the dancer expressed everything in motions. Moreover, finally, Y

Dance hope that all these thoughts and minds will be passed on to many people with the dance film "넋: Soul". We have appreciated the mix between sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to dance: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and ? How much importance does play in your process?

The most important thing is sympathy and communication with the audience. In order to derive these, scheduling movements and improvisation must be appropriately combined. Creating detailed dance from eyes to fingers, by considering and practising them, is the way to present the best movements to the audience. However, the impromptu movements that a dancer feels momentarily look different. The dance that is naturally exposed to music, and the emotions and expressions of the moment, apparently are beautiful. In fact, my works usually contain much improvisation, as I find them more valuable Sometimes, improvisational movements convey more than choreography. "넋: Soul", included choreography, music, and calculated composition. However, the dancer's movements became stronger, from the moment it ran to the extreme choice of suicide in the second half. It was also the moment that dancer approached the audience emotionally with natural movements that the dancer was immersed in the situation of suicide. The immersion of the moment showed the most

Women Cinemakers significant effect, which is the most significant advantage of improvisation. Art historian Ernst Gombrich once underlined the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so that they can in the creation of the illusion: how much important is for you to trigger the viewer's imagination in order to address them to elaborate ? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood?

Sometimes invisible is deeper and wider than visible. This is called 'beauty of space’ in Oriental arts, one of the ways to express what it contains, rather than the shape of the object. In other words, it can be filled with emptiness. Artists can show the best of emptiness and give the audience the opportunity to fill it with their imagination. Since most people interpret arts with their own experiences, the art of emptiness is understood in various meanings. Moreover, this is the most beautiful and positive aspect of art. It is the sharing and communicating art, not a one-sided way of communication, which gives the audience the opportunities to participate independently. There are many similarities between “beauty of space” and “Opportunity for thinking and Understanding”. In other words, it is not an art that delivers directly, but art that interprets, considers and understands from people’s experiences. I do not want the audience to understand all of my art. What I want is that they can

Women Cinemakers experience different perspectives and understand each other through my art. Also, I want people to find what I say about any social and political phenomenon from my art, and to have some time to think independently, from light and small thoughts to profound considerations. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in cinema. For more than half a century women have been from getting behind the camera, however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. What's your view on ? Do you think it is harder for women artists to have their projects green lit today?

The thing that I felt very depressed about was that the female on the screen was relatively fixed. Women have always had to care about their beauty, and to be weak and passive. So, it seems that wise and courageous images appeared to overcome these forms when women become the main character. Women have always looked different. However, humans are beautiful in many ways, and so do women. I hope that various aspects of women and their thoughts will be revealed. Also, I hope people can see the women themselves, not the women images which were created. When I try to articulate a social and political phenomenon, such as sexual violence and sexual discrimination, as art, I have often been misunderstood

as "I concentrate on them because I am a woman". However, it was just because that I was trying to share my opinion as a person interested in society. I hope there will be no misunderstanding that the thoughts and emotions of female artists appear in art. It is not women who express themselves because they are women, but they want to talk about their interests as artists. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Yerin. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

First of all, I would like to deal with the problems and phenomenon of society through my art, like “넋: Soul”. As I am interested in politics, society and dance film, I would like to study about social and political performance, especially with dance film. In particular, I want to find the potential of Korean traditional performance as a social and political performance and create dance film about our reality. And I will make all this with Y Dance. I can say that our another dance film that follows "넋: Soul" is on the process. We ask for your support and encouragement. Lastly, I would also like to thank WomenCinemakers for giving me this fantastic opportunity. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Tânia Moreira David Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal

‘A house as an endless body’, corporealizes an osmotic encounter between a human body - a woman dancing - and the body of architecture Lisbon's aqueduct underground gallery. An intimate and sensorial architectural experience presented through the cinematic apparatus. The film had its origin in Frederick Kiesler’s Endless house, which shows an organicist approach to architectural space: the house as a living organism, an extension of the human body, as opposed to modern functionalist architecture, materialised in Le Corbusier’s house as a machine for living. Kiesler writes: “The house is neither a machine nor a work of art. The house is a living organism, not just an arrangement of dead materials: it lives as a whole and in the details. The house is the skin of the human body”. Exhibiting an experimental approach to the representation of the sensorial experience in architectural space, the project investigates a way to reveal a sensitive and intimate experience, exceeding the geometrical representation of architecture, which shows a distant relationship between spectator and film. The representation of the sensorial experience of architecture is presented beyond its rational character revealing it self on the sensation. This means that rather then representing a body as a distant object, the film looks for constituting it self as an experiential body. By recreating new connections between its parts, which appear beyond continuous space-time, the film presents an architectural space with a new logic: the fixed elements and references of architecture - form, dimensions, and coordinates - are deconstructed, unfolding the space to new possibilities and new sensations. Simultaneously, the use of haptic visuality emphasizes the corporeal relation between spectator and film, by appealing to the former’s senses as a whole, thus creating a new body. Dance is shown along with the cinematic devise as a high means of recreating architecture, due to its ability to transform chronological time and objective space.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Tânia and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to invite our readers to visit

http://www.taniamoreiradavid.com in order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied Architecture, Fine Arts, and you also hold a master’s degree in film

Tânia Moreira David Photo by Filipa A�vila Antunes

project, that you received from Lisbon Film School: how did these different experience influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to your Portuguese roots direct the trajectory of your artistic research? Hello WomenCinemakers. These experiences influenced my evolution in distinct modes with a constant permeability between them. Having studied Architecture granted me a method and structure of thought. However, the practice didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fulfill my demand for artistic expression, which led me to explore another medium that could reveal my interior sensitivity. Although I am no longer practicing architecture, my relation with it persists. The primary material of my films is the architectural experience conveyed through the dancing body. Dance was also a relevant part of my biography as I practiced ballet since an early age and more recently contemporary dance. Being trained in Fine Arts had much influence on my formal approach to film, from which I inherited the necessity of composition, the desire to control form, light, color, and matter. Finally, film is the medium that is able to express and convey more freely and genuinely my thoughts and emotions. My Portuguese cultural roots didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a direct influence on my artistic work and research, since its based on a universal artistic body only. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Casa, Corpo sem fim, an extremely interesting dance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/171384817/491d2315d5. When walking our readers through the genesis of Casa, Corpo

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Women Cinemakers sem fim, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? The initial idea emerges from the desire to represent an intimate and sensorial architectural experience that could appeal to the spectatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s haptic perception and physicality, in order to awake him to unusual modes of experiencing architecture. Friederick Kieslerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s organicist reflexion, which presents the house as a living organism, an extension of the human body as opposed to modernist functionalism and orthogonality and the project that materializes it, the Endless house, were a reference while looking for the space and inspired the cinematographic approach. The concept also develops from the formal and material character of the chosen architectural space. We have appreciated the way your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? What is the role of improvisation in your process? My approach to film presents a balance between scheduling and spontaneity. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s necessary to previously define intentions and orientations, so a space of intimacy and a spontaneous encounter among the dancing body and the architecture can occur in situ, allowing unexpected filmic situations. In my creative process, the role of improvisation is to create a place of purity within the represented experience, even if the

dancer - Valentina Parravicini

film is an artifice, as well as in the relationship between the crew and the object of the film. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, Casa, Corpo sem fim corporealizes an osmotic encounter between a human body and the body of architecture. Walking the spectatorship to the point of convergence between human body and the body of architecture, Casa, Corpo sem fim has drawn heavily from the specifics of the environment of Lisbon's aqueduct

underground gallery and we have highly appreciated the way you have created such insightful resonance between space and movement: how did you select the location and how did it affect your performative and shooting process? After a long repĂŠrage together with Modo Imago, we found a place that was suited to the concept of the project. The formal character of the gallery as an interior space without an exterior correlation, as well as its

humanized scale, met the idea of seclusion and allowed an intense exploration of the intimacy and affectivity between the two bodies. Also, the obscurity of the space had a great influence on the aesthetical approach, permitting to explore the light hues and contrasts. Moreover, the water element constantly present in the gallery contributed to investigating the relationship between body and matter that led to diverse gestures and sensory experiences, and had direct correspondence on the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cinematography and sonority.

Since the first time we had the chance to view Casa, Corpo sem fim we have appreciated the way it unveils the point of convergence between the abstract nature of movement and the physicality of body and space. Art historian Ernst Gombrich once underlined the importance of providing a space for the viewer to project onto, so that they can actively participate in the creation of the illusion: as an art researched particularly interested in investigating the

relationship between spectator and film, how important is for you to trigger the viewer's imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal associations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? I think it’s very important to explore the projection space mentioned by Ernst Gombrich. It is essential for me to trigger the viewer’s imagination so they can participate actively in the cinematographic experience. I am mainly interested in appealing to the spectator’s physicality and sensory memories, through exploring the notion of duration and the haptic image, as a means to activate his hidden experiences. These personal embodied memories are crucial to the viewer’s recreation of the architectural situations presented. I consider my artworks as having an autonomous and polysemic character. They are open objects with an abstract quality and can be read and felt beyond my filmic intentions, transformed according to the spectator’s individual imaginary. In this sense Casa, Corpo sem fim frequently and intentionally doesn’t reveal entirely the space and the body, calling the viewers to bring the images from latency. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks?

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Women Cinemakers

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Women Cinemakers The physical act is truly unavoidable. The abstract feature of my ideas is deeply connected to the physical aspect of the creative process. This means that the cinematographic intentions are expressed through the body of the film, which in turn reflects my physical experience while shooting and editing; In each phase of the working process, my body projects itself on the body of the film, imprinting durations, gestures, rhythms, vibrations. Therefore Casa, Corpo sem fim can be perceived as an experiential body, merging the experience of a dancing body with my physicality in the creative act. Sound and visual are crucial in your practice and we have appreciated the way the sound tapestry provides the footage of Casa, Corpo sem fim with such an ethereal and a bit enigmatic atmosphere: how would you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see the relationship between sound and movement? In my practice sound has a central role in expressing the concept of the film, it shows the ability to recreate heterogeneous spaces and atmospheres, appealing directly to the spectatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s senses in a synesthetic mode. My present approach to sound emerges from an experimentation path that begins in my first film La Petite Maison, an architectural seduction, in which music conveys an emotional line, and arrives at Casa, Corpo sem fim. In this film, the sound is used beyond narrative, symbolism or signification. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s constituted by textures and vibrations - some sonorities appear like sense memories - which corporealizes the architectural experience.

I consider sound and movement as independent elements. As the relationship between sound and image should be presented beyond continuous redundancy, sound and movement can meet and diverge during the film in a constant interplay, reflecting differently. Over the years your works have been showcased in a number of international occasions: in particular, ‘La Petite Maison, an architectural seduction’ won the prize for best film at ‘InShadow’s Festival 2012’ and has participated in Film Festivals all over the world, from New York to Moscow: how important is for you the feedback that you receive in the festival circuit? And how do you feel previewing a film before an audience? The feedback that I receive in the festival circuit is important to me as the film cycle ends with its exhibition. Although the recognition of my work is gratifying to me, it’s not my main objective. I don’t consider the public or curators opinion as an essential element on my creative decisions. I am mainly interested to express my ideas and emotions. It pleases me to touch the audience with my work, perceiving emotions and readings on my films, which follow or go beyond my intentions. Before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an

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A still from

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Women Cinemakers unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? My films emerge from personal concerns and express a particular approach that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t follow the subjects, formats, and lengths of many festivals. At the same time, my artistic work lacks funding due to its distinct nature. Being a woman makes this situation even more difficult. Therefore, strength and persistence are necessary to be able to cope with this artistic context and to break through these preconceptions. Women have been slowly overcoming the strict limits of an artistic field dominated by men and by a male gaze, establishing other viewpoints that reflect diversified experiences and a heterogeneous world, but thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still a long way to go. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, TĂ˘nia. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Thank you WomenCinemakers for such a stimulating interview. In the future, I would like to keep investigating the interdisciplinary field and exploring different modes of expression such as videoart for the freedom it enables. The evolution of my work is unknown to me. Fortunately, the element of surprise is a driving force in my creative process. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Kara Dunne Lives and works in Massachusetts, USA Dressed in 1950s ballroom attire, I make my way down stairs. First part of this video was shot in 2008 while living in Providence. In 2014, I decided to continue the piece, making it an ongoing life-long video, with a new staircase added every 6 months.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com Hello Kara and welcome to : we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: after your studies in Performance art and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, you earned your BFA in Printamaking / Glass from the Alfred University and you later nurtured your education with an MFA in Printmaking from The Rhode Island School of Design. How did these experiences influenced your artistic trajectory? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of your artistic research? While studying art at Alfred, I was also part of the theatre crowd. I straddled both worlds because of it, and as much as I enjoyed participating in theatre and art, I also was disappointed by the

limitations of each art form. I finally pinpointed why I was so unsatisfied. After making a piece of art, I was essentially giving up any direct contact with the viewer. Once finished, my art lived separately from me. After the art show it was in, I wouldn’t be able to see the reactions of people when they looked at it; it would live on a wall in a frame in an unknown location. The artwork was basically an extension of myself and represented me, but I would never be able to speak about it since I wasn’t there. I had a hard time with artwork being a cold byproduct of the artist. In theatre, I was given lines to say and a character to portray on stage in front of an audience. It thrilled me to be physically present in front of the viewer, and I enjoyed the ‘in the moment’ kind of rush I would get with the direct connection I had between the character I was playing and the people who were watching. I had some amount of artistic freedom to make small scale independent decisions for how the character was depicted on stage, but ultimately there was a director who ran the show who called the shots and who had to follow the playwright’s script no matter what. I wanted

Women Cinemakers more from making art and acting, and when I learned about performance, a kind of hybrid between the two art forms, I began my artistic quest to connect directly with the viewer. Even though the professor and mentor who introduced me to performance was a performance artist himself, there were still no strictly performance courses offered at Alfred. Junior year, a large number of my peers were going abroad for a semester. I wanted to go somewhere else and study performance. I didn’t have to go far, and that’s how I ended up in Boston as a visiting student in the performance art department at the Museum School. I took as many classes as I could fit into my schedule, and it was indeed a game changer for me and my artistic practice. I understood what the medium of ephemeral art was by practicing it every day. Looking through the theatre lens, during a performance I was the playwright, director and actor all in one. I called the shots, I made up the character, I put together the set, props and costumes. Performance fulfilled the need I had to be physically present in my work, and bridged the gap between myself and the audience. Being in a big city for the first time in my life, I had a world of strangers around me (my potential audience) to try out my performance ideas on. I documented my performances with video and learned basic editing techniques. I grew to enjoy editing video and began making video specific performance pieces, with no live audience in mind. Going to RISD allowed me to really focus and delve into where my ideas came from, the underlying themes in my work, and moreover explore what form my ideas could take. I love the process of printmaking, and after learning how to screen-print at RISD, a world of easily printed material opened up to me. I started making props and costumes for previous performance ideas that I had thought up before I learned how to screen print. For example, I always wanted to perform as a paper doll, tapping into the viewer’s personal connection with toys and their childhood. Dressing another person, you don’t know is weird, for sure, but dressing a live paper doll that’s frozen in place would essentially be non-threatening. Screenprinting allowed me to make my own paper doll clothes. This

particular printing technique was so freeing because I could easily print on things other than traditional paper. I had some extra vacuum bags in my apartment and started to think about how I could change the context of the vacuum bag itself just by printing something onto it. I grew up in a Catholic household, so the Virgin Mary has always held a special place in my heart; she has always been an epic icon for me. What would happen if I printed the Virgin Mary onto a vacuum bag? How would this give a different meaning to the object? It would no longer be a regular utilitarian object meant to collect dust. It would have spiritual presence. It would be holy; a holy receptacle that collected sin. Well, once I had this realization, a performance idea surfaced- I could have a cleaning service for people’s sins using this special Virgin Mary vacuum bag. I can only speak for American culture, but when Americans have dirty undesirable tasks to do, they usually hire someone else to do it for them. The performance ‘Mary’s Mighty Maids’ is a commentary of this part of American culture, the passing the dirty work off to someone else. It was also another example of one of my live events made possible by both printmaking and performance. As for my artistic research and where it comes from- my spiritual development as a child led to a deep interest in history in my teenage years, which now continues in my adult life. I’ve always loved learning about what life used to be like; I love folklore and myth. I grew up wandering the land around my house by myself and exploring nature, and I think that through this solitary wandering, my observational skills developed as well as my ability to be alone without distraction; I can sit in silence and think, take in what is around me and most importantly I am able to wait patiently for inspiration to come. As an avid nature observer, I also watch people. In watching people, I study their habits and essentially research their behaviors, which ties into what I make my performances and videos about. You are a versatile artist and your pratice is marked out with such stimulating multidisciplinary feature, including print making, video and performance art: before starting to

elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to in order to our readers to visit get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you tell us what does address you to such captivating multidisciplinary approach? How do you select a medium in order to explore a particular theme? Just like having three different ways of getting around town- a convertible, a minivan and a Vespa, each medium I use satisfies a

different way of getting from point A to point B with an idea. Performance is something that is cathartic for me; it is the most direct route to satisfy that urge to connect with the viewer. Printmaking satisfies my love of drawing and creating multiples of that drawing to give out to others, and video enables me to explore ways in which I can use the environment around me in order to tell a story, collaging and piecing together moments in time that have already happened. With an idea, I always consider

the experience of the viewer first, just like the director of a play. How will the audience “get” this idea? If it is a print, will the person want to turn the pages in order see more? If it’s a video, where will it take place? Who will be the audience of this performance? I don’t necessarily select one of these the three mediums before exploring a new idea, most likely what will happen is that I have an “aha!” moment, usually out of the blue or while reading about something, and I will have something to

say. Then I think about how to say it, and that leads me to choose which media to say it in. It an idea is political in nature, it tends to end up as a pamphlet or poster, and if it is a social commentary on human behavior, it will most likely result in a performance or video. I never know where an idea will go, but that is what makes it all exciting. An idea may end up first taking form using printmaking, like the Virgin Mary on vacuum bags, and then lead to a later performance because of the existence

Women Cinemakers that printed object. Or a performance idea will require certain paper made props, only made possible by printmaking techniques. There was a time when I needed to develop a space to show my three videos (‘She’s Going Down Stairs’, ‘Go Round’ and ‘Crossing’) that was more viewer involved and viewer experience driven than just having three TVs on a wall playing the videos. So I made a living room space, with a loveseat facing the videos, and a fireplace nearby. I screen printed wallpaper for behind the fireplace, and hung a print above the mantel that was made around the time I produced the three videos. Both the wallpaper and print related to the concept of the videos. The fireplace was fake, and electric logs glowed from the hearth while soft music played with the sounds of fire crackling. Personally, as a viewer of art myself I enjoy art that has multiple levels to understand or experience it. In a gallery, there will be people looking at a painting for ten seconds, and there will be people sitting in front of it for a half hour. I wanted to offer an experience of my work to both kinds of people, but also reward those who spent more time with me with a better experience. So for this installation space, I offered an audio tour (similar to one you would find in a traditional museum exhibition) and if the viewer decided to take time to listen to the audio, it would give them background behind the work, as well as lead them to the location of two secret videos hidden within the space- one behind the framed print above the mantel, the other inside the fireplace mantel. Both secret videos were related to the theme of the three videos on the wall. I would love to work with installation all the time because it is the best means by which I can incorporate all three mediums I work with. For this special edition of

we have selected , an extremely interesting peformance video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at . What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the relationship between body and space is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such refined aesthetic, inviting the viewers to such a multilayered experience: when walking our readers through

Women Cinemakers the genesis of did you develop the initial idea?

, would you tell us how

Living in Providence, Rhode Island for two years during grad school, it was my first time in an older city and around big, beautiful old mansions. A lot of them were open to the public, and I would spend time exploring historic mansions all around the city. All of them had gorgeous interiors, back when the construction of a house meant paying attention to every little detail and embellishing as much as possible. The staircases drew me in the most- there were so many beautiful old staircases. The look of a staircase at the turn of the century said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;look who is coming downstairs!â&#x20AC;? in an entirely different way than a plain, boring staircase today. I became obsessed with staircases, and had a vision of a lady in a ball gown coming down an endless staircase. In the back of my mind of course were scenes from old movies, from the time period when these staircases were new. My mother made me a fancy looking dress from a 1950s sewing pattern, I bought gloves, costume jewelry and heels, and decided to make it happen. It was fairly easy as a student to call up a place and gain access to their stairs, so Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d show up with my camera and tripod, and get sweaty running up and down the stairs. I treat the video frame as if it were a canvas itself, and experiment with composition throughout the piece. In the back of my mind when setting up shots with my camera I ask myself how the lady in orange will move through that frame. Will she start in the left corner? Will she come towards you suddenly? How much of the staircase and the surrounding interior is carefully calculated in order to conceal or reveal my figure traveling within the landscape of the stairs. The lady in the dress becomes a laser pointer, leading the viewer through the video, grabbing their eye and taking direct control of it. The attention of the viewer no doubt changes throughout the video since there are so many staircases, but this was my intention. The audience will experience boredom at some point and their mind will wander, but something in the video will catch their attention again and they will find themselves back inside the unending spiral. The piece is a tribute to the details that were once cared about. The craftsmanship that went into building these staircases is almost

Women Cinemakers unbelievable when compared to today’s standards. By the time I am in my golden years and adding more staircases, there is a chance that some of the earlier staircases won’t exist anymore. Not only does the piece document my own aging process as I go down stairs, but it also captures the ephemeral reality of the staircases themselves- that they will also age over time. While filming, I would often have the whole house to myself, so I would wander from room to room and sometimes take more video. I started to document myself in front of beautiful fireplaces as well, which seemed to be in every room I came across. Working with video, I take as much footage as possible, even if I don’t know what I’m going to do with it later. This was the case with all the fireplace shots, which later ended up as a separate video of me standing in front of fireplace after fireplace, as if waiting for someone to enter the room. This video ended up in the living room installation, hidden behind the framed print above the fireplace. We have appreciated the way your approach to performance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does play improvisation in your process? Improvisation is an extremely appropriate word for making art. I feel as if I am improvising every time I sit at my drawing table in the studio. Improvisation in the theatre world means you take a situation and build on that situation with an acting partner without preplanning anything. When taking video, I go to a location and do not alter the space. I am not allowed to take down paintings or move objects, and often I have no control over the lighting. Sometimes I only have a half hour before I am told people will need to move around and make noise again, or that there will be a wedding reception outside. Taking your video camera to somewhere you’ve never been before is similar in the

way that the product is dependent upon the present moment, a present moment that you will not have total control over. You can pre-plan your costume and where you are going to film, but other than that, it is almost like the space itself will lead you to the right shots, and you can only receive this important guidance while physically present in the space. The staircase at the Ames Mansion was the first staircase I had encountered that had obvious doors to other spaces on one of the staircase landings. It would have been impossible to take the doors out of the shot, so I decided it was an opportunity for me to make a first attempt in the video to exit the endless staircase, so in the video I try both doors (which end up being locked); an almost plot twist, solely derived from improvisation. Body language has become an improvisational factor of this piece because the spaces are so different- my body as it travels down stairs will adjust to the pitch of the staircase, the width of the steps, the existence of a carpet, the bare hardwood, or the size of the banister and how easily I can swing around in route. I also have to consider how my body language will change from the first staircase to the twentieth staircase, and this is also improvised over time. I guess I never realized how important improvisation is in how I work until you asked me this. One of my most spontaneous, improvised videos happened when traveling to Ireland. Along my journey I stopped by a second hand clothing store and found the most amazing, hard to describe here, poofy silver sequined skirt. I had never seen anything like it; it was like a sculptural piece because of it’s sturdiness and structure (it was impossible to sit down comfortably in it). Even though I had no space left in my hiking pack, and the thing weighed four pounds, I still had to buy it. I kind of beat myself up about my seemingly unnecessary purchase until I got to where I was staying in the Burren. The Burren is full of limestone rocks that cover the land as if it were the moon’s surface. I wanted to somehow use this unique landscape in a video and highlight its vastness and overall surreal beauty. The skirt I bought reminded me of a wearable rock, so I decided to put it on and document myself walking and running through the terrain. I tried as many ways as possible to use my

A still from

Women Cinemakers shiny rock bottom half to explore the boundaries of the framecrossing the screen from far away, being up close, popping up from a crevasse; I treated my rock costume as a way to blend in with the background in order to conceal or reveal myself from shot to shot. With video, I collect as many shots as possible, and then back in the editing room (I make this sound fancy), I sift through what I have to find the gold within. At the time of gathering the first staircases, I also had in mind two other similar epic scenarios. One, inspired by old films again, where a woman chases after a train she has missed and catches it (‘Crossing’). The other was of a woman running the opposite direction on a carousel (‘Go Round’). These videos tied in with the revolving, spiral theme of the staircase video. The stairs, the train and the carousel were meant to be played simultaneously next to each other, adding to the experience of the viewer that they are going no where with a lot of effort. I’ve come to realize that documenting something requires flexibility on site, and sometimes what you expect to happen, does not, but what you get instead may be better than what you planned. For the train video, all other train companies laughed at me when I asked them for permission to film and said I’d be a liability if I was to try to run and jump on their train. Finally, I got permission from a local dinner train company (which was perfect because their train were made to look like it is from the turn of the century). I got to the remote location where the train company told me to go and set up for the train’s departure. I had two friends come to help; one camera was set up outside the train at the railroad crossing, and one was on the train looking out the window pointed back in my direction. Even though I was told that this was where the train started its journey, and logically it would be picking up speed over time, I wasn’t expecting the train to be moving super slow at first. I also didn’t take into account how little space I would have to run between the start of the train and where the train tracks ended up in dense overgrown bushes. I realized how slow the train was going during the first (and

only) take, and I immediately tried to compensate for the train’s slowness by making it look like I was running faster. After I couldn’t chase the train anymore, it stopped about a half a mile ahead of me on the tracks. I thought maybe it was coming back to pick up another train car. I waited for it to come back, but it never did, and after 20 minutes it started up again and faded into the distance. I thought maybe I could somehow piece the awkward video together so it would look realistic. No such luck. All was not lost, however. What I didn’t realize was that while I was waiting at the train crossing for the train to come back, my friend was still filming. The footage of me waiting for the train was by far more interesting than anything I was trying to do in the first place. The actions of me pacing back and forth, hands on hips, looking in the distance, and doing jumping jacks and push ups from boredom, was completely improvisational and genuine. That moment in time became the finished piece. As you have explained in your artist's statement, is an ongoing life-long video, with a new staircase added every 6 months: how do you consider the role of daily experience as the starting point of your creative process: how does everyday life's experience fuel your artistic journey? Inspiration (also known as artist’s fuel) is supplied to me most often when I am out of the studio and living everyday life. Going to new places, spending time with new people in those places, is when inspiration pops up. I think about inspiration as a jack in the box. (That children’s toy metal box with a crank on the side that you turn and turn and eventually at some point a clown pops out). As an artist, you’re always waiting for inspiration to pop up, but you never truly know when it’s going to happen. Just like turning that crank on the jack in the box, you turn the gears and essentially you are part of the process of jack coming out of his box, but you can never predict when jack will finally pop out. And you are always surprised. Just by

Women Cinemakers getting out of the studio and living the every day routine, you are turning that crank and therefore no doubt will have a new idea pop out of the blue when you least expect it. involves the audience in a voyeuristic and heightened visual experience, urging them to challenge their perceptual categories to create personal narratives: in this sense, we dare say that it reflects German photographer Andreas Gursky's words, when he stated that Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something: how important is for you to address the viewer's imagination in order to elaborate personal associations? And how open would you like your works to be understood? I love that Gursky quote. Art should leave some breathing room for the viewer. I make the kind of art that I’d like to look at; something that has a degree of mystery in it. I believe if art makes the viewer ask questions, it is doing its job. If I were to paint pretty pictures of barns or sailboats, I would of course be richer than I am now because that’s the kind of visual report on reality the average person enjoys buying and putting up above their couch in their living room, however there is no space left for imagination. Reality has been set in stone, and pretty much the only questions left to the ask when looking this kind of work is- what kind of animal is in that barn? Or where is that sailboat going? Now, if the barn looks like a regular barn but there no windows or doors, it would inspire many more questions because it is not realistic; the artist has left space for the viewer to tap into their inner imagination and wonder what is going on. The viewer can now think about what is happening behind what they see. I could have made a video with myself going down one staircase. But by the time the viewer sees me going down the third staircase, questions arise because reality and logic are tested. Putting mystery in the mundane is important to me. If you challenge what is ordinary, the viewer will see the ordinary differently, and maybe even start to appreciate the ordinary and begin to observe a little mystery in their own seemingly mundane surroundings. Watching the stairs is boring after a while, no doubt about it, but this is entirely the point. To “zone out” or to lose

Women Cinemakers focus while watching this lady in a fancy dress go down staircase after staircase is actually letting oneself go; in our hyper focused world surrounded by digital entertainment at our fingertips, we are never left alone with our own thoughts. Boredom is important for everybody to experience; it is open time that is not filled with activity, which allows the brain to process what has already happened and for new ideas to surface. Artists know how to tap into this valuable resource of boredom and make magical things happen because of it. But we all did the same thing when we were kids. When we were bored, we made up games. We role-played and things that were imaginary became real. Artists are not super human, they just know that times of boredom (also known as solitude) are positive ones, and are able to harness the powers of it. Most non-artist people (those who also do not have hobbies) look at boredom with fear. Their time must be filled continuously, or they don’t know what to do with themselves. Or are they afraid of the thoughts that will surface during their time of boredom? Watching the stairs, the mind wanders to the boredom playground. This of course is a very personal playground for the viewer. Imagination is fueled by boredom and the mundane. We all have the power to access our imagination, and art is a way in which people can exercise this forgotten part of human nature. I don’t expect everyone to “get” a piece; my work is open to interpretation. I realize that people’s attention spans vary, and what I try to do is to test how I can pull people into a video and hold them there for a while, knowing at some point they may will lose interest, but in the end, some people will stay until the very end. It is for those kinds of people that I make my work. We like the way highlights the resonance between ordinary gestures and the indoor environment. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the

Women Cinemakers relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? My body in the staircase video acts as a laser pointer in a presentation. As the viewer, you will always find me, either far away in the space, or all of a sudden up close. Your eye is hyper-focused on the orange dressed lady as she weaves and winds through the staircase ever changing terrain. Watching the lady travel down the stairs, the viewer becomes aware of how that particular staircase functions- allowing the physical transition from being up high to going down low in space. Each staircase is shown using multiple camera angles in order to highlight the range of its individual beauty, but what happens after watching so many different parts of numerous staircases is that the individuality of each staircase becomes muddied and specific details of the staircases blur together and abstract shapes start to emerge from the spaces themselvesellipses, triangles, and squares. The viewer of course knows that this cannot be one continuous staircase, but it is my aim to make them forget that; I try to seamlessly move them from one staircase to the next using the most logical next position of my figure on screen. In order to link the different staircases together, I look for similar banister shapes, lighting, or other decorative elements. I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pre plan these connections; I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have my staircases lined up for the future. It would be ideal to make sure that the staircases will go together perfectly by planning them all out, but that would be extremely time consuming, and also take away the challenge I enjoy of fitting the new staircase with the previous one. I try to get enough camera angles so that I have a variety of footage to choose from. The idea of the continuous staircase is essentially abstract, and played out in a pseudo reality using my body traveling through the space. Whenever I use my body in a video piece, in the back of my mind I am considering the space as an abstract entity that I can manipulate using the presence of my figure. Over the years you have exhibited in several occasions, including your recent shows , at AFA Gallery and

Women Cinemakers Representing Feminism(s), at Lamont Gallery. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the ability to establish direct involvement with the viewers, who urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception? In particular, as an artist particularly intereted in subjetive interpretation, what do you hope your art will trigger in the spectatorship? My original intention for performance was to break the audience away from their every day routines. People travel around in the own little bubbles, and I wanted to poke those bubbles. I was first interested in performing on the streets in order to disrupt the daily grind of people as they went to work. Performance events and live art happenings outside the gallery always seemed more memorable to me because they happened when the average person living their daily routine all of the sudden becomes a spectator. For one of my first performances, I made myself into a fire hydrant and protested against unsafe hosing practices at the state capital. I was interested in bringing ordinary objects to life at the time. I then decided to take the idea of stage and audience to a different level with my bathroom performances. I call them â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bathroom vignettes: scenes in a bathroomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. I realized one day (a jack in the box moment) that the most private, yet public space is the bathroom. What a perfect performance space! I designed various happenings inside and outside the bathroom; in one vignette I played racquetball against the far wall in the ladiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; room, in another I awarded certificates of completion to people exiting the bathroom, congratulated them, shook their hand, asked for their name and wrote in their name on their certificate. The most audience involved performance piece is where I am a live paper doll. I printed life size paper doll clothes and assembled a costume where the audience can attach the clothes to my body. I stand there with my clothes in front of me on the floor waiting to be dressed. The audience members that are the least inhibited are the ones to play the game first, but eventually the shy

Women Cinemakers people will give it a try. It is my hope that spectatorship serves as another avenue for understanding the ideas behind my work. You don’t go to the art to see it, the art comes to you; this is the best time when the viewer has let your guard down and has no expectations. I made a Virgin Mary costume and wanted to bring her to life, first in an art museum. I wanted to walk around the religious painting room at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and stand next to another museum visitor looking at a painting of the Madonna and child. (I was carrying a plastic baby Jesus from a holiday light manger). I was my intention to stand next to this random person in silence for a few moments, and then turn to say, “They got my nose all wrong.” Or “Doesn’t my butt look too big?” Hopefully causing a pleasant surprise for that visitor and giving them another dimension of experiencing the Madonna and child, but also leading them to ask…yeah, what would the Virgin Mary think if she were here looking at this portrait of her? Testing the audience is part of the relationship I have with them. The Mary performance, part of the ‘Femambiance’ series, has evolved over the years but the ultimate goal is to test people. I am fascinated by the global following from Virgin Mary sightings around the world, from Virgin Mary shaped stains showing up overnight in windows, to knots found in doorways that resemble her form; people take into full faith that she is making herself known. As a spiritual person, I believe these things are possible, but I wanted to know if people would believe it if she actually showed up in person. What if she were walking around in real life? ‘Femambiance’ tries to test this. So it all boils down to me wanting to take people away from their everyday routines so that they can observe something out of the ordinary, and to test them to see how far they may become involved, emotionally or physically. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than

Women Cinemakers half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? I think that the interdisciplinary field is definitely an artistic avenue for women artists to go down. Men still dominate other single specific medias, like painting. By having more than one artistic output, the interdisciplinary work of women artists will more likely be seen. Recognition may be easier to attain for artists who paint, make videos and use clay, for example. It’s not just about making the work, but getting it out there. Women need to find or make their own venues to show their work, and they need to support each other in doing this. We have to make it happen for ourselves. I am reminded of the famous 1989 Guerilla Girls public service banner about the representation of female artists in the art world, ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?’ stating that ‘less than 5% of artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.’ Sadly, the 2011 update to this banner shows the number of women artists in the Modern Art Sections dropped to 4%. We’ve got to make ourselves known, and above all, keep making art. Being unconventional just means you aren’t making work in order to make other people happy, you are making work to make yourself happy. Artists see the world in an unconventional way, and in general wish to express their unconventional ideas about the world to both unconventional and conventional people. My experience as an artist who typically makes work that steers away from what is made for main stream fine art production has been a mixed bag of success and failure. I haven’t gotten as far as I thought I would. I’ve been at this making art thing for a long time now, and at first I thought I’d hop on some sort of notoriety train after grad school but was left waiting at the station for the train to show up. Eventually I said, why the heck am I even depending on that train to get me places when I can walk there myself? It will just take me longer, but I can get there. So I made

Women Cinemakers my way down the tracks, knowing I’d end up somewhere if I just kept going. I stopped getting frustrated from rejection and decided to be true to myself and make whatever I felt inspired to make, in whatever medium seemed to be the best way to make it happen. I believe the future will be positive for women artists, as long as we don’t give up on ourselves. Never throw in the towel because you never sell work or you don’t get into a lot of shows. If you like to make, then make. Make the artwork you want to make. Don’t cater to an audience. Good art is dependent anyway on being true to creative voice. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Kara. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? My work will evolve by continuing to revolve. I have had a performance in mind for years but haven’t been able to figure out who to talk to about letting me do it. Stemming from my revolving theme of videos (carousel & staircase), I would like to turn a revolving door into a performance space. A revolving door is a perfect place for public interaction. Divided into four segments, one taken up by the performer, three people potentially become part of the performance within the door. This series of performances would be similar to my ‘bathroom vignettes’, where I would be doing different things in my segment of the door as it rotates. A few ideas: attach a canvas to the glass and paint the outside of the building as I go around, or play a trumpet while having a box of other instruments available inside and outside the door so that people can join in the revolving door band as they pass through the doorway. I’d also like to try and make my print work more assessable to people: pamphlets, hand fans, smaller screen prints in large editions…just drop them on doorsteps and share my work with others. Start a subscription service where people could sign up for the next printed thing, and I would send it to them (for free). Financially that’s not realistic right now; I would need help from an outside source. I’ll try my

luck at getting some grants and see if I can make it happen. Either I wait around and continue to not sell anything as my work piles up around me, or I just put it all out there during my lifetime so people of all income levels can enjoy it. As for the staircase video I will continue to add stairs. As a graduate student, it was easy to gain access anywhere to film. I was a non-threatening school kid, just some girl who wanted to do a harmless school project, of course we’ll help you out they said- come right in. Five years later, asking the same permissions, I was suddenly some random unknown artist lady asking if I could come into the house and take weird video; it’s kind of backwards to think about that change of dynamic- when you are no longer an art student and become an actual artist, you are not trusted at first. It has been more difficult to get people to buy into my idea and donate their staircases. I called around, I dropped information cards off on people’s doorsteps trying to find interest in the video. I got a few emails back, and ended up in a handful of private residences. I also search through real estate listings for houses built before 1900 and on the market for over a million dollars so that I can scroll through the pictures and do some staircase fishing. Through this process I’ve sent out dozens of letters to residences I know have a gorgeous old staircase, and I’ve received a few positive responses. I have my eye on a staircase inside the Lello Bookshop in Oporto, Portugal. It is absolutely amazing, look it up. It is one of my dream staircases to include in the piece. I’d love to cross the big blue ocean some time in the next decade and take some staircase videos in other countries and highlight some international staircases. Perhaps over time the video will peak more and more interest, and one day the Queen will call me up to come on over to the palace and go up and down her stairs. Who knows.

An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Women Cinemakers meets

Pamela Arce Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

My practice focuses on cultural narratives of the body, specifically the definition of body we create from the interactions with our environment. I think of the diversity of bodies as the base to observe the infinity of possible relations with the social and spatial structures that surround us, exclusive or inclusive architectures, depending on the subject. I am inclined to think that there are endless opportunities for knowledge in the responses of dissident or not optimized bodies to normative environments. Through ceramics and video, I have begun a catalog of unexpected movements and how they translate into knowledge about ourselves, the potential of our bodies and the power structures that we sustain and under which we operate. When presenting my work, I look for emotional reactions to recalibrate the perception of the spectator. Derived from ruptures in our quotidian, the stories I transmit act as catalyzers for the emotions and thoughts that take place in approximations to knowledge. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com

Hello Pamela and welcome to WomenCinemakers: we would like to invite our readers to visit http://pamela-a.com in

order to get a wider idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Are there any experiences that did particularly influence your evolution as a choreographer and as an artist in general? Moreover what did address you to focus a

part of your artistic research on the intersection between choreography and video? Hello, I guess we always move through the space, following different trajectories whether or not we are conscious about it. My evolution as an artist was probably informed by different moments and stages, sometimes all happening at the same time. Five years ago, I had been working on some installations, and for one of my projects I began thinking about the use of ceramics. At that time I knew very little about ceramics, and even less about the process of making, but I engaged with it, and for the period of time leading up to the exhibition I was working at a ceramics studio almost everyday. After that project ended I continued working with clay and have never stopped since. I mention this because it would become key to my video production, which started around the same time. The continued contact with matter, made me pay more attention to phenomena throughout the body as a vessel for experience, not only based on my own experience but other bodies and minds, which I started to visually archive. In the years since I began working with video, my ceramics practice has always accompanied the process, and has made me re-wire the ways in which I understand time and obligatory resilience one has to have in response to the whimsical nature of matter, which

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Women Cinemakers have permeated how I address and navigate video making. Some say my videos have very tactile qualities, and I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t agree more. Going back to your question, the intersection between choreography and video happened very organically. After working in installation (creating and staging objects to be interacted with and experienced by the public), I narrowed my practice to the body, and movement in itself, where I found an amazing and wide scenario to work with, solitarily as well as collaboratively. There have been particular people along the way, who have deeply influenced my discourse and helped me expand my views of the world beyond my own self. For this special edition of WomenCinemakers we have selected Rehearsal, an extremely interesting film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/192120884. What has at once captured our attention of your insightful inquiry into the importance of body percussion as a guiding mechanism in dance-making is the way you have provided the results of your artistic research with such refined aesthetic, inviting the

viewers to such a multilayered experience: when walking our readers through the genesis of Rehearsal, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? I was in Lima when I saw online an article about Fernandas Bianchinisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; School of Dance for the Blind. I quickly started my search and watched some small videos and interviews that were made with their director Fernanda Bianchini. I was

captured by the challenges and possibilities this practice could bring for the blind as well as how their approach seemed to challenge the traditional exercise of ballet and its size-ism. Without having a clear idea, I decided to approach the school, and I was boarding the plane two weeks later. I had never visited the city of Sao Paolo before, which is a very imposing city. It is within this context that I started attending the rehearsals at the school. I sometimes think my

work was informed not only by what was happening at the school but also by the city in which the school exists. Being one of the biggest cities in South America, to me Sao Paulo is of a different scale, with many highways and huge distances to traverse, the idea of the blind students (most of them woman), continuously moving around the city, often alone, was incredibly impressive and courageous. The dance, the trust in each other while rehearsing was also

a language of support, which I think in some way is communicated by the work. I stayed there for 10 days, focused on the rehearsals, and the everyday discoveries of different gestures and relations. We have appreciated the way your approach to dance conveys sense of freedom and reflects rigorous approach to the grammar of body language: how do you consider the

Women Cinemakers relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of your performative gestures and the need of spontaneity? How much importance does improvisation play in your process? I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able to say there is one approach or method, all my projects have different natures and require different approaches, but I guess in the end if I feel free and trust the process, the outcome will also reflect that. In the case of Rehearsal, I approached it as a videographer. In this process, I was a quite the spectator. The dancers were very kind to receive me and what is a reality is that their processes and routines are results of long seasons of rehearsals. So I was accompanying their movements and in doing so I was able to capture them learning, rehearsing, always learning. Maybe that is what we appreciate or can read as spontaneity. Other projects have followed other logics. For Trust the Flesh, the project that followed Rehearsal, I was more involved in the generation of the movements, but I always left a bit of space for the unknown, later to be found in the editing process. Rehearsal involves the audience in a voyeuristic and heightened visual

experience, urging them to question the process of doing and learning: what are you hoping RESONANCE will trigger in the spectatorship? In particular, how much important is for you to address the viewers to elaborate personal associations? Oh I love the effect Rehearsal has on people, I think it calls on some particular experience each one of us recognises in them-self. Its a patient work, almost real time, where we can feel familiar with how much this body to body thing is present in our lives to learn about body, space, and to break frontiers. I think you feel the time passing and it gives you the time to absorb it. I think it directly talks to the body of the public. Your successful attempt to re-calibrate the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception and provoke emotional reactions seems to create a a gateway into other realities: how do you consider the relationship between perceptual reality and the realm of imagination? As you said I very much see this work as a window into other worlds, an intimate one, among others. When we imagine, or wonder, we are learning too, not only about ourselves but

also outside of ourselves, and I believe this work makes you wonder. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body in their creative processes, as you did in Trust the Flesh. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? Trust the Flesh followed another process of making. This work is related to the accident of a very dear friend of mine. After it, we were able to communicate about this experience, and this was the initial step in the configuration of the work. The importance of the dialogue and words is the heart of it. In relation to the physical act as being unavoidable, I think it definitely talks to this project, because movement came in order to accompany these relations, and dialogues. It came to embody the caring act of addressing pain and transformation. Inquiring into the diversity of bodies as the base to observe the infinity of possible relations with

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Women Cinemakers the social and spatial structures that surround us, exclusive or inclusive architectures, your works seems to unveil the resonance between human body, movement and architectural space: how do you consider the relationship between the body and its surroundings? Moreover, how does the locations influence your performative gestures? Once I started to focus more on the body in my works, I began realizing how some physical structures are not designed for all bodies, they specifically address and cater for a type of body, one that responds to the able/optimal body. The surrounding structures are built on able ideologies, which more often than not, hardly find obstacles to be reproduced. It is in this regard that I think it is important to reconsider and rework the private spheres of the mind by questioning how spaces can work for others, not just one determined body. This ultimately will have tangible effects on the physical world. Overall, we all learn and adapt to our environments and to our traditions. That’s why our environments —always embedded by ideology— need to be talked about to see their possibilities. When we talk about a physical realm, we are always talking about

Women Cinemakers the intangible, which is often what shapes the physical world. I think there is also the possibility of expanding the exploration of these ideologies in terms of gender, opening up to the possibilities of different and changing bodies, which larger power structures also have the duty to respond to, through access to rights and legislation. Over the years your artworks have been internationally showcased, including your participation to Video Visions screenings as part of Melbourneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Channels Festival at ACMI and the Love Stories exhibition at the Diaphane Photoaumnales Festival in Paris. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to establish direct involvement with the viewers. So we would like to ask you a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process? I think my work addresses experiences that we or someone we know or heard of might have gone through. They are the tales of life, they are those

particular moments where the mind stops, and as I said before, is left to wonder. In a way they are these episodes where we find meaning, and in a way they conjure a specific power of questioning and deep understanding of onesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; self. I guess everything comes at the time we are ready to see it. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this conversation we want to catch this occasion to ask you to express your view on the future of women in contemporary art scene. For more than half a century women have been discouraged from producing something 'uncommon', however in the last decades there are signs that something is changing. How would you describe your personal experience as an unconventional artist? And what's your view on the future of women in this interdisciplinary field? Maybe what I can add to the discussion, from my own experience and the one of my peer women practitioners, is that there is a great deal of women out there, that I have had the luck to have worked with in all stages of my work. I find their energy limitless. I think this effort in discouraging

Women Cinemakers women to not do and produce under the argument that historically men have done something more, doesn't mean it was done better. It’s just a matter of adjustment and access for women to do it, privilege is not a sign of competence. And I think as long as we see other women as apt professionals to work with, we are on the right track, and when I say this I talk about all instances of production. It has also been important for me to meet and work with women artists that are mothers, partners, and have families, which I don’t see contrary to having a strong profession and will to work, as has been used also sometimes against women to question their level of commitment. It only adds to the point that we are all built on experience, and the different experiences will always enrich the human exchange. I think the arts field should be coherent with this. For one of my last projects I was recently watching some shorts of the Kurdish women’s army, one of the ones that have proven to be more effective against ISIS on the border between Turkey and Syria. Women that were fighting, who have sometimes been captured and tortured by members of ISIS, were also standing

up for the Argentinian bill on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. One may ask how these events relate? Maybe it is that all womens’ lives intersect in the quest for our rights, and to watch the Kurdish women bodies dancing in unison in the open and arid mountains, after what their bodies and minds have had to go through, was the proof women are relentless. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Pamela. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? I am currently working on dance as a form of social engagement and embodiment of rights. I will be displaying some video and ceramics for this project. I can only hope that I continue to be lucky enough for new stories to come my way and that I have the sensitivity to listen. Thank you WomenCinemakers for the interview. An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com