Welcome to Official Selection for DANCE

The Tides

0:02:27

United States

Sophia Williams, Director

The Tides: At the beginnings of a movement to amplify the under-heard voices of dance.

Created and directed by female Cypriot/New Zealander artistic director, Sophia Williams, and choreographed by Leiland Charles on the Artists of Pointeworks.

Director Bio

Sophie Williams, started her ballet training at Ballet Arte Academy of Classical Ballet, before spending one year in Miami City Ballet’s Pre Professional Division. Highlights of her professional career include performing as the First and Second Violins in Concerto Barocco, Dark Angel in George Balanchine’s Serenade, and Gamzatti in La Bayadère; in the corps de ballet of Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, with the Richmond Ballet; and in various full length productions, including Alicia Alonso’s Giselle with Ballet San Jose, and Edwaard Liang’s Don Quixote and Cinderella with BalletMet. In 2020, Williams joined the Corps de Ballet of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, where she had the opportunities to perform in Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Ethan Stiefel’s Giselle. She joined Texas Ballet Theater in 2022, where she has had the opportunity to perform new and existing works by Ben Stevenson. Williams has enjoyed engaging in the creative processes with the National Choreographers Initiative and Chamber Dance Project. 

In 2023 Williams founded Pointeworks with a vision to inspire our communities with world class ballet and our love of the art by forging a space for passionate artists to create and collaborate. 

Director Statement

Pointeworks strives to achieve its mission of connecting artists and audiences of all backgrounds, while giving a much-needed platform to under-heard artists of our community. We strive to highlight female and BIPOC artists and choreographers. The Tides Film is our first project to provide a platform to these artists. 

The Tides is a pas de deux that was choreographed for the artists of Pointeworks by Leiland Charles. The film was created under the artistic vision of Sophie Williams and produced with videographer Alexander Sargent. 

A Feast That Never Comes

0:16:22:00

United States

Maria Juranic,

Director

Original Score, Sven Britt

A Feast That Never Comes, explores four  characters who inhabit cycles within cycles of contentment, discontentment, inertia, movement, desire, and betrayal. A story emerges—told through the marriage of music (Ex-Fiancée) and dance (ChrisMastersDance)—functioning as a set of nesting dolls, inviting you to uncover as many layers as you wish. Directed by Maria Juranic.

Director Biography - Maria Juranic is an immigrant from Yugoslavia, who is a director and editor working in New York, and Los Angeles. She has made visuals on a variety of media platforms from music videos and advertising to fashion and film. She also teaches graduate students cinematography at Brooklyn College.

In the last decade, Maria has been writing and directing short form content for brands and companies as disparate as Conde Nast and Sesame Street. She recently directed the 10-part SnapChat Originals miniseries "Action Royale,” and her short documentary “RedBone” is currently distributed on NBC LX. 

She is also sought out by labels such as Warner and Universal for her music videos. Her work has been seen on MTV, VH1, Rolling Stone and Nowness. Her latest music video for Poliça, "Agree," is a Vimeo Staff Pick, and her most recent branded spot won a 2019 Gold Telly Award. She is a recipient of the 2017 Jerome Foundation Grant and 2013 WIFT Grant.

Director Statement

Investigation and interrogation is at the heart of this project. We carve pathways for witnesses to ask their own questions and draw their own conclusions. We began with an examination of technology’s effects on everything from our understanding of self and others to communication, mental health, digital outrage, public and private presentation, and cycles of abuse.

The result is work that functions not as declarative, but rather as interrogative, always leaving the listener with more questions than answers. To suppose that an artist has all the answers is hubris at its most incessant and troubling. Here, we can’t find a singular truth, because art must reflect life. Instead, you are invited to grapple with the same questions that the creator struggles with.

The musical, lyrical, and visual motifs that repeat throughout the project may be taken as clues to the artist’s intent. But from there, you’re on your own. The only intent that prevails in A Feast That Never Comes is that of openness and investigation; there is no right answer, but there’s also no right question. You are hereby invited to ask your own questions, and provide your own answers. The work remains fundamentally unfinished without you.

With love and graciousness,
Maria Juranic (Director), Sven Britt (Ex-Fiancée, Composer), Chris Masters (ChrisMastersDance, Choreographer)

The Migrant Body

0:12:00

United States

Paul Gil Higa, 

Cal Hopwood, Directors

The Migrant Body

examines human migration through the creative lens of PH Dance's Artistic Director, Paula Higa. Deriving from her personal experience as a dual citizen of Brazil and the United States, Higa researched various motives for individual displacement. People migrate for many reasons, from new life experiences to security, from demography to human rights, and from socio-economic grounds to climate change. Thus, this performance focuses on the meaning of self-discovery by uncovering physical geography, the gap between past and present, and the sense of not having a home. Dancemaker Paula Higa proposes a reflection on who is not a migrant in this world.

Paula Higa is a Brazilian-born American choreographer who has been making dances, teaching and performing for more than 30 years between Brazil and the USA. She is an Assistant Professor and Resident choreographer in the School of the Arts - Dance Program at the University of Vermont. She holds an MFA in Dance from UWM, a BS in Chemical Engineering in Brazil, a certification in PBT - Progressing Ballet Technique, and lots of experience within the arts field.
In 2016, she founded her dance company, PHD - Paula Higa Dance, and Encounters-- an improvisational work of music and dance. As a performer, she danced in the works of Mark Morris, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Larry Keigwin, Jennifer Monson, among others. Her work has been performed nationally and internationally.
She is the recipient of the NEFA - New England Dance Fund Grant, UVM - Coor Collaborative Fellows Award, Vermont Community Foundation's Artist Grant, Vermont Arts Council - Artist Development Grant, OVPR Express Grant, and others. Her recent creation, The One I Wanted To Be, in collaboration with visual artist Jenn Karson, was twice awarded Best Screendance in Los Angeles, and officially selected for the Genres and Performances Film Festival in Aveiro, Portugal, Diorama International Film Festival in India, 2022 Nukhufest in NYC, IMARP in Brazil, and the ARFF - Around International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany.

Director Statement

As a dance maker, I believe choreography is research. I am interested in uncovering themes rooted in the intersection of dance and the visual arts. My works are rooted in feminism and examine discriminatory issues in our society. I hope to give voice to underrepresented categories, inviting my audience to reflect on power inequality, gender hierarchy, and patriarchy. My creative process investigates the relationship between body, movement, and narrative. I create sophisticated but provocative dances based on the information around me. I genuinely believe in the power of the arts.

TA MARA

0:10:00

Poland

Iwona PasińskaI, Director

This production was inspired by the life and paintings of Tamara Lempicka. Principal photography took place in Park Mużakowski which has been listed on the UNESCO List of World Cultural and Natural Heritage since 2004. The Park is administered on the Polish side by the National Heritage Institute and on the German side by Fürst–Pückler–Park Bad Muskau Foundation.

The film consists of two, polar opposite approaches to imagery, that merge into an ambiguous yet enticing portrait of a woman. One one side, TA MARA is overwhelmed by an artistic frenzy that awakens her inner demon, on the other - she is calm, frozen in a state of perpetual waiting. These extremes, similar to the sides of Muskau Park, form one single unity. The expressed movements of female dancers from the Polish Dance Theater team reflect the elegance, precision and figurality of Łempicka's paintings.

Tamara Lempicka was an exceptional artist - her paintings modern and full of vivid colors. She found inspiration in cubism, neoclassical paintings by Boticielli and motion pictures (which became popular in the 1920's and 1930’s). Her lifestyle was as unorthodox as it was scandalous. 

Lempicka died in 1980. Her ashes, according to her will, was scattered above El Popo volcano in Mexico. Tamara’s paintings are continuously sought after by collectors and pop culture icons, including Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Jack Nicolson. Her turbulent life was dramatized into numerous extremely popular theatre plays. She herself became an icon, her art recognized as timeless.

Only two of Tamaras Lempicka's paintings remain in polish public collections: “Still nature” in the Mazovian Museum in Płock and “Lassitude” in the National Museum in Warsaw.

Iwona Pasińska, director is a choreographer, movement dramatist, theatre theorist, artistic director of Movements Factory and founder of the Movements Factory Foundation. In 1997 Pasińska became the principal dancer of the Polish Dance Theatre. Since 2010 she has been collaborating as choreographer or movement dramaturge with dramatic theatres, operas and alternative theatres. She graduated from theatre theory at the Adam Mickiewicz University, where she also did her PhD. In 2016 she has become the Director of the Polish Dance Theatre.

Three Souls in Search of an Embrace

0:14:16

United States

Filmed in Argentina

Tom Donohue, 

Greg Shaya, Directors

This film is about three dancers, one blind, one in a wheelchair, and one born with just one leg. They compete to be accepted in perhaps the most exclusive of environments: the World Tango Championship of Buenos Aires. There is no category for "the physically challenged". There is, however, a chance. Tango is danced with the soul.

Flight

0:10:00

United States

Loretta Thomas, Director

Flight, is a film about flight from danger, the toll this can take on people, and yet there can still be hope and peace in the end.

LORETTA THOMAS has performed and taught for over 40 years. Her dance education includes Isadora

Duncan’s work with many Duncan master teachers, scholarship studies with Merce Cunningham, ballet with

Maggie Black, Tai Chi with Master Cheng Hsing Yu and an apprenticeship with Laura Dean. She has performed

with the Michael Sokoloff Dance Ensemble, of Austin and San Francisco, Austin Civic Ballet and Lori Belilove &

the Isadora Duncan Dance Co. She currently works with Dances by Isadora and Catherine Gallant/Dance as well

as presenting her own company Moving Visions Dancers on stage and film. Since 1980, Ms. Thomas has taught

at her Moving Visions Studio, at the Isadora Duncan Foundation for Contemporary Dance and in workshop at

Vassar College, Texas Women’s University, Houston Performing Arts High School, the National Dance Educator

Organization’s conference and the Isadora Duncan International Symposium. She currently on faculty at Mark

Morris Dance Center where she teaches in the Dance for Parkinson’s Disease program, teaches Classic Modern

Dance at Gibney Dance Center and is the artistic director at Moving Vision Inc. Her Moving Visions Dancers

have performed in the Paul Taylor Youth Ensemble Showcase, with Dances by Isadora and

CatherineGallant.Dance in performances at Central Park, 92 St Y, St. Marks Church and Jacob’s Pillow and at

multiple modern dance venues in New York City with Moving Visions Inc. In 2020 Ms Thomas created the dance

films, Saudades and The Well, with producer/editor Daniel Madoff. The Well was awarded best dance film in

festivals in Austin, Los Angeles, Houston, Toronto and Cannes as well as being presented in festivals in Paris,

Berlin, Florence, London and Argentina. In 2022 she and Madoff created two more films, Holier Than Thou and

Flight, which has received best dance film in festivals in Stockholm, Budapest, Florence, Singapore, Jaisalmer,

West Bengal and Altanta as well as being presented in festivals in Hollywood, London, Paris, Toronto and

Ireland. Ms Thomas’ Moving Visions Dancers will be performing in NYC and will create a new film with Mr

Madoff in spring 2024. www.movingvisionsdance.com