According to Dance Camera West’s Kelly Hargraves it all comes down to math.
“It is competitive to get into our festival. Last year we had 325 films submitted and we showed 50-60. This year we had 250 submissions and we’re showing 16. There’s a 10% chance you’ll get in…or less.”
Dance Camera West is a Los Angeles-based film festival that showcases the best in international dance films. Hargraves co-founded the festival twenty years ago and has served as the Executive and Artistic Director of Dance Camera West since 2018.
Like any festival in the past year, Dance Camera West has had to find new ways of doing things. The 2021 festival will take place on January 30th and 31st as a drive-in movie event at Santa Monica College in conjunction with The Broad Stage.
“I think it will be so cool to see these films so big,” said Hargraves by phone last week. “It’s also sad that we won’t all be communing which is why people love theater in the first place, but you won’t have to panic about safety. I’m not looking forward to seeing my face 25 feet high. If I come out of this with any ego, you’ll know it was strong.”
As for the films themselves, one thing Hargraves is pleased about is the reinvention of how dance can be presented on film.
“There are still 3-4 ways to make dance films, but the biggest evolution about dance is the loss of the proscenium frame and the films we choose don’t have a front view. We want the camera in duet with the performer, so the moving camera and performer create a different dimension of dance. Now because of the evolution of cameras and drones, it’s a lot more expansive. They have the ability to go from minute detail of a baby toe to a huge landscape and see how they fit in the environment.”
It should be noted that Hargraves does not decide which films make the festival each year.
“I’m working really hard to not just make it my vision. It needs to be hipper, cooler, more gender diverse. We have 30 people reviewing films and four people on a jury.”
The films that did make it into the festival range from films shot on a huge canvas before the pandemic to films that were shot under the restrictions required during it.
“I really like to go back and forth between what one artist can do on their own and what others with a big cast can do. Showing both side by side is fine. I don’t really want to show only the high production value. I want to help support the artists coming up with work on their own.”
One of the smaller, and more moving films, is Forest Floor, directed and choreographed by Robbie Synge. He appears in the film with his longtime collaborator Julie Cleves.
“It’s a beautiful film that touches people emotionally because of the way it’s made. What I like about that film is there’s a little bit of a narrative forming and characters and relationships that play out more in films than on stage. With those two the intimacy is there from the beginning because of their relationship.”
Given what the last few years have wrought on the world, it comes as no surprise that there are a couple films with politics on their mind. For instance, Heidi Duckler’s ESCAPE, which was filmed in three different locations in Chile in November 2019. Hargraves revealed a bit of how that film came to be.
“She didn’t set out to make it blatantly political until it became that and she decided they needed to capture what was going on. It’s a lovely film, the way they used the environment, the site specific-ness of it. The other one that is working directly toward that is Second Seed by Baye & Asa.” Second Seed was created in response to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
Last year Dance Camera West was online. Hargraves is looking forward to a post-Covid festival in 2022.
“I’m looking forward to everything that happens after Covid! I swear I’m going to Target to enjoy it. I pray that our perspective has shifted and we’re full of gratitude for every little thing we see, do and touch. I hope people have discovered the power of dance films. The great thing about this year is people are discovering it in a new way.”
Every festival, whether by accident or design, somehow ends up reflecting who we are in a given moment. Famed dancer/choreographer Martha Graham wrote in her memoir, Blood Memory, “I feel the essence of dance is the expression of man – the landscape of his soul.”
Hargraves has very definite ideas of how Dance Camera West 2021 reflects the landscape of our souls.
“Artists are going to make work, especially dancers, with whatever they can. Whatever limitations they have, it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity. How lucky are we that through this pandemic we’re all connected through social media and we have phones at home to take photos and videos. I just think dancers are amazing. They are making stuff out of nothing. It’s just there if you let yourself see it.”
Dance Camera West 2021 is being shown in two parts. Each night Program A and Program B will be shown. You can watch both programs in one night or come back on successive nights to see each program. There are eight films in each program. For details go here.
Main Photo: An image from ESCAPE (Courtesy Dance Camera West)