This Friday, East Campus Quad will provide the backdrop for an outdoor screening of international dance films from New York City’s Dance Films Association and Duke dance students. Sponsored by the Dance Program and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image, “Dance for the Camera-Out-Doors” aims to create a relaxed atmosphere for the Duke and Durham community to explore the intersection of choreography and film editing.
The interdisciplinary event will present four feature works from the Dance Films Association: “Flying Lesson,” “Ebony Goddess,” “The Mysteries of Nature” and “The Cost of Living.” It will also showcase three two- to three-minute dance films created by Duke students in Dance for the Camera, a course in the Dance Program that was offered for the first time this past spring.
For their final project, students, who were required to have dance experience, choreographed their own dances and used film editing techniques to create a visual work expressing topics of their own interests.
“I want to present an eclectic idea of what Dance for the Camera is, and that no singular voice and vision are necessary,” said Andrea Woods Valdes, an assistant professor of the practice of Dance who teaches Dance for the Camera and coordinated the event.
She added that the selection of feature films complements the Duke student works and connects their projects to the art world beyond Duke.
“The thing that constitutes dance is a body in motion, and people interpret that in very different ways,” said junior Sarah McCaffery, whose short film, “The Unheard,” will be featured at the event.
In “The Unheard,” which was filmed underneath the chapel, McCaffery seeks, through dance, to express voices that usually go unheard at Duke and raise awareness about human rights and social justice issues.
Woods Valdes hopes that the dance films not only introduce the audience to new content expressed by the dancers, but help them to reconsider the role of movement in film and the practice of dance.
“Our background as dance-oriented people is the stuff of which film is made,” she said. “When you’re watching sports on television, you’re looking at the body from a similar perspective, that sense of physicality and what the body is doing.”
She expressed hopes that watching dance through film will help viewers see dance as a serious discipline rather than a form of distraction or entertainment.
“Many students don’t know you can study dance at Duke as rigorously as you can the sciences, when in fact most artists are as intense with their arts as with their scholarship,” she said.
For McCaffery, the interplay of dance and film opened up a realm of creative possibilities that she says pushed her farther as a dancer.
“Being able to take a camera and get new angles, close-ups on count eight, switch to the overview and zoom in and out quickly—those aesthetic visuals are not possible when you’re watching a performance on stage,” she said.
One of the primary goals of the event, however, is much more basic: to spread awareness of and foster the arts community at Duke.
“We’re doing the festival to create a spontaneous community between the freshmen in the dorms, the dance and art audience at Duke, as well as the larger Durham dance community,” Woods Valdés said. “The dance studio is right on East Campus, so we wanted to bring the presence of dance out onto the quad and make it more available for the people who live there.”
Overall, the works in “Dance for the Camera-Out-Doors” aim to present dance in an accessible light, but with greater sophistication than popular television programs like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars.
“The selection of works challenge questions like who dances, why they dance and where dance happens,” Woods Valdés said. “I hope the evening is thought-provoking and heart-provoking and a deeper step into dance than what we see on television.”
“Dance for the Camera-Out-Doors” will be held tomorrow, Sept. 30, at 7:30pm on the East Campus Quad. The event is free and open to the public.
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