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For your lens only

A festival of dance films gets off the ground this Saturday. ANJANA RAJAN has the details

The nice thing about Delhi, with all its civic irritations and political abominations, is that there is enough intellectual and cultural space for those who care to look for it, those who care to create it. So it is that this Saturday evening sees the opening of a rare event, Dancelenz, A Festival of Dance for the Camera, at the India Habitat Centre. The three-day festival is the result of a collaboration between Arshiya Sethi's Kri Foundation and Odissi dancer Ileana Citaristi's Art Vision.

"I've been carrying this idea with me for 12 years," says Arshiya, who besides writing on dance, has a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration between artistes, and creates opportunities through Kri to engender discussion between art practitioners, audiences and scholars. Expectedly, the festival includes talks by eminent people from related fields.

It was Arshiya's experience in television that led her to think of how inadequate was the match between dance elements like performance and choreography on the one hand and the technical elements of camera work on the other. As for preserving the country's innumerable theatre art traditions, she adds, "Basically in India there is no tradition of preserving dance through artistic documentation." The emphasis here is on `artistic', on the need to realise that "there is a new dynamic in the film medium."

As Ileana puts it, "When films stop being a two-dimensional recording of existing choreographies and become a creative collaboration between movement, rhythm, camera and editing process, the roles of the choreographer and the film director become interchangeable, and often the two merge into the same person. The new genre to emerge from this creative collaboration is referred to as dance video. In the films presented in this year special package this collaboration is shown in more than one way."

Documentary is only one of the ways in which the art of dance and cinema come together. This familiar genre finds perhaps two representatives in DanceLenz. One is Shantarate Misra's And Miles to Flow, which juxtaposes four of Asia's performing forms, Kathakali, Noh, Kabuki and Chinese Opera, while another is Ein Lall's Sharira, which presents the well-known choreographer Chandralekha through three of her productions. Ileana, who has been curating the dance film segment of the Mumbai International Film Festival, has made sure to provide an eclectic selection for DanceLenz.

Among these is the 13-minute Australian production, River Woman. This film, originally made for television, is a collaboration between choreographer Bernadette Walang and the acclaimed dance filmmaker Michelle Mahrer.

There are so many aspects to be explored, Arshiya is sure she has enough material to put together an annual festival for the next 10 years, provided the funding is forthcoming. The current exploration takes in its sweep the still image too, she emphasises, summing up, "There is a need to understand how both the dance and the lens need each other and augment each other in increasing geographical spread in subtle layering and nuances of meaning and movement."

Here's to the dancing camera. Let the show begin!

Festival focus

Films

River Woman And Miles to Flow
Homebody
Double Take
Tango Octogenario
Lapinthrope
The Cost of Living Dance without Drugs? Why not
now

Speakers

February 11
Keynote address: Ileana
Citaristi, Chair: Shanta Serbjeet Singh

February 12

Keynote address: Ein
Lall, Chair: Shanta Serbjeet Singh

February13

Keynote address: Dhiraj
Chavda, Chair: Shanta Serbjeet Singh

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