Friday, 28 November 2008
Dear LUTSF,
Re: Report on Funded Activity
to LUTSF
Please find
enclosed my report on my travel to attend the ReelDance Festival in
In May 2008, I was invited to attend ReelDance,
a biennial festival of international screendance taking place in Sydney, which
I would not have been able to take up without the support of the the Lisa
Ullmann Travelling Scholarship Fund. The trip enhanced my knowledge in several
areas of my work and gave me the opportunity to meet many inspiring
practitioners. Being invited along with other international curators was a
great privilege, and an affirmation of my work to date.
Over the course of my stay at ReelDance, I sat
on a discussion panel, contributed to key meetings between international
practitioners, observed and reported on a three-day workshop for artists
working in screendance, met with Australian artists and brought knowledge of
films and creative practice back to the UK and to other partners abroad. I had
a very rich and rewarding experience at in
I want to thank the Lisa Ullmann Travelling
Scholarship Fund again for making this possible.
Yours sincerely
Gitta Wigro
REPORT
Visiting ReelDance 2008
In May 2008, I was invited to attend
ReelDance, a biennial festival of international screendance taking place in
Over the course of my stay at
ReelDance, I sat on a discussion panel, contributed to key meetings between
international practitioners, observed and reported on a three-day workshop for
artists working in screendance, met with Australian artists and brought
knowledge of films and creative practice back to the UK and to other partners
abroad.
Festival Programme
The public screening programme was a
central reason for attending, as my ability to programme screenings is
dependent on building a personal ‘library’ of films to draw on. Witnessing
festivals in different contexts also helps to continually keep me alive to
different rationales and responses when curating.
Erin Brannigan, the director of the festival, is respected within the field for
her knowledge of historical and current work and critical facility, and I was
grateful for the opportunity to experience the festival programme in its
entirety. It was an exciting and varied programme, with an overarching theme
(‘Everyday dance’), but loosely interpreted to allow for a wide range of works.
I was somewhat surprised to see that there was little work from Australasia
other than from
As a piece of ‘homework’ for myself
I decided to write brief ‘reviews’ of the Australian works that engaged me
most; I have enclosed a copy of these with this report. I have shared them with
In experiencing the festival and in
a meeting with Erin, I also noted similarities and differences from practical
points of view (e.g. marketing, audience development and audience profile)
which informed my thinking about my current work, and also gave me an
opportunity to reflect on my time working at the
ReelDance is very strong in building
and growing successful creative and business partnerships, something which I
often find challenging, and gained from seeing these ‘in action’ in a variety
of models at the festival.
The festival programme included a
panel discussion with the international guests for local artists. The aim was
to disseminate knowledge about distributing your work (most dance film output
is brought to its audience via festivals).
Eduardo Bonito of Dança em Foco spoke for the Latin American network (Red
Sudamericana de Danza), Janine offered her view from an internationally
recognised festival in Europe (Cinedance), and I gave my perspective of
independent curation for different venues as well as speaking from my festival
background. The questions were
interesting, ranging from practical questions to discussion of artistic policy.
Topics we touched on were:
-
Dance film
developments and trends
-
Presenting
installation work: implications for the presenter in terms of access to
audiences, press and funding
-
Fostering emerging
regional work alongside established international output
-
Eduardo: if I don’t
show Brazilian films, who will
-
Presenting dance
film outside the dance ‘ghetto’ (i.e. dance venues and audiences)
-
Production values
-
The curators’ work
in pushing the boundaries (a discussion I was able to take up later in the year
when invited to give a paper at Screendance
- State of the Art)
-
What the outside pressures
on presenters are, and how we had dealt with those situations
Workshop
ReelDance also included a three-day workshop for Australian dance and film artists with festival guest artists Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes. Erin Brannigan spontaneously offered me the opportunity to observe the workshop. As I programme workshops for artists and occasionally teach as well, this was a unique opportunity. Katrina and Simon are experienced teachers (among many other things, Katrina has written the first and to date only practical guide to creating dance for the camera). Katrina particularly works with improvisation techniques applied to both the dance and the camera, and explores the effects of placing the camera physically in the performer’s space. The discussions generated by exercises and viewing materials added to my understanding of dance and film as a form as well as inspiring my teaching. I have attached a separate report on the workshop.
Venue and surroundings
The CarriageWorks was an exciting venue to be in. It is vast; it has many different exhibition and performance spaces, and several areas that are still being renovated and repurposed, which offered an interesting venue for the workshop participants’ explorations. Concurrent with ReelDance, CarriageWorks hosted an exhibition of video art entitled Experimenta Playground, which complemented the ReelDance programme perfectly.
Media And Dance meeting
One particularly important meeting
to participate in was the Media and Dance Network meeting, which resulted our
drawing up a concrete plan of action to improve the networks’ effectiveness.
International guest Janine Dijkmeijer (The Netherlands) runs the website for
MAD, Eduardo Bonito (
We discussed other relevant issues, including:
-
Audience
development strategies
-
New media curation
-
Workshop structures
The next MAD meeting has been
flagged for Dança em Foco in
I also asked
She had also been looking for an
international partner to deliver a co-commission of an installation piece for
which she has a AUS$ grant to be completed by 2010. She is looking for someone
to help navigate co-commission, open to engaging in curatorial dialogue, and
keen to export and exchange with
Screendance.org meeting
A further meeting with the
international guests discussed an initiative to build an archive of dance films
and videos, accessible via the internet.
This initiative – Screendance.org – was started by Scottish artists Simon
Fildes and Katrina McPherson, who set up videodance.org.uk and the
media-and-dance e-list, both widely used resources within the screendance
‘community’ of artists, curators, teachers and students.
The project proposes to publish, generate and promote critical writing on
screendance, and offer video capacity to effectively deliver an archive of
screendance work, which could also include documentaries and performance
recordings. I feel strongly that combining those two elements, discourse and
archive, is a worthwhile way to proceed – discourse in dance is often hampered
through the relative inaccessibility of material, especially at an
international level, and building an archive with a strong commitment to
rigorous discourse would strengthen its curatorial policy. Using the internet
as a platform means that it is accessible independent of the researcher’s
physical location. Trough allowing dance practitioners across the globe to
reference a shared history of work this archive could have a profound, lasting
impact on dance.
ReelDance had called the meeting as they have access to funds to develop an
online catalogue of Australian films, and hoped to be able to use those funds
in a way that would support the Screendance.org endeavour, maximising the
impact of the investment they can make beyond the national boundaries. Having
run Videoworks, which was at the time the
We discussed who the primary users
would be and their respective needs in terms of content and metadata. I learnt
much from an IT/database specialist who had been invited to talk about feasible
models of online video databases to deliver the technical side of this online
catalogue.
We discussed the following points
- International funding
As discussed at the MAD meeting, there are problems associated with finding, accessing and managing money across several countries; we resolved for each partner to find the money for their ‘section’ of the database - Metadata
As a research tool a catalogue is only useful if work is presented with sufficient and appropriate metadata, which has to be ‘future proof’. It needs to be searchable (and time needs to be spent thinking about what future researchers might need), it has to be comprehensive, culturally specific (this might then need a glossary: e.g. ‘modern’ dance in the
YouTube is an interesting example for self-classification, but often results in unhelpful sub-division. A mixed approach of suggested and self-chosen ‘search tags’ might be appropriate. - Screendance.org would function as the
international portal through which the other databases can be accessed.
ReelDance offered to make their template available to other festivals so
that the ‘national’ databases would be compatible and more easily linked
via an international site such as Screendance.org
- MAD would operate under the broader scope of
Screendance
The meeting was very successful,
with fruitful discussion, and buy-in into the idea from the international
curators present. The hope is to develop this for 2010, which is when ReelDance
is planning to have its dance screen portal ready.
When I was invited later in the year
to attend the Screendance – State of The
Art conference in
I was able to update Arts Council
England’s national office (officer working on digital strategy / dance) and
regional
Networking
I was able to meet many Australian
artists in person, discuss their work, and hear their view of the national and international
scene. Observing the workshop also helped to get to know artists better early
in the week, which in turn helped meet their friends and peers throughout the
rest of the festival. Later in the year I was able to provide one of the
Australian artists I met with information and support to fundraise for her
visit to the
I was struck by the number of
artists who held the work coming out of the UK in high regard, and envied its
infrastructure for dance film; while in the UK there are some who will say that
the UK’s ‘golden age’ of high profile broadcast investment and distribution is
over. Erin reflected back another observation – she noticed that the
programming practice of
The Australian artists are very
aware of the relative youth of the dance film sector in their country, but are
feeling – and I think rightly so – that the work now holds its own in the
international circuit, although many of them expressed feelings of isolation
from European and US arts communities. One hopes that travel both ways helps
overcome this sense of separation.
u
Overall, I had a very rich and
rewarding experience at ReelDance in
I want to thank the Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship Fund again for making
this possible.
Gitta Wigro
November 2008
Additional Materials: **
Festival brochure
Workshop report
Film reviews
Selection of photos
Carriage Works Space
Dance Film Workshop
Dance Film Workshop
Dance Film Workshop
** Available in LUTSF Archive