A dance-plog with improvised moves and poetry on the Rock Beach on Friday morning will kick off the third edition of the Manifest Dance-Film Festival.
The free-entry festival, hosted by AuroApaar, a city-based dance-film collective, will involve screenings, live performance, workshops and lec-dems for participants interested in an evolving genre of story-telling, that is a sort of kinetic mash-up of cinema and dance.
The three-day festival (July 26-28) will screen 50 films over 12 sections at the auditorium of the Alliance Francaise. The film bouquet includes ‘The Source’, ‘Cats. Why Do We Need Them’, ‘A Butterfy is Knocking on the Window’.
Film-makers from US, Sweden, Iran and Austria will attend the screening of their works here in addition to sharing their expertise at workshops, said Ashavari Majumdar, co-founder of AuroApaar and festival convenor.
As an enmeshing, rather than criss-crossing of the genres of cinema and dance, dance-films speak through the lens of the camera in a new language loaded with exciting possibilities.
According to AuroApaar, while the camera reveals new aspects of the body, rhythm and movement to dancers, dance as a medium expands the meaning of performance when translated to screen. The creative tensions produce a harmonious hyphenation of the two forms of art and a new language capable of complex articulations.
The high points include a master class by filmmaker K. Hariharan on ‘Choreography for Melodrama in Indian Cinema’ and an interdisciplinary show by Andrea Hackl , whose project, Dreamer won the 2023 award for the best interdisciplinary performance at Lens Dans, Belgium and who is presenting at the festival courtesy of a European art grant.
The live events section also features ‘Abhyas Somatics’, a lec-dem by Navtej Johar, ‘Metamorphosis’ by Papia Chakraborty/Surendra, ‘Her Waters Broke’ by Grace Gitadelila respectively, and ‘Dance as Yoga’ by Rekha Tandon. Abhilash Ningappa leads a workshop ‘Embodying Critical Situations’, while Sugandh and Leah present a session ‘Don’t Think, Just Dance’.
Meanwhile, in a fillip to the dance-film movement in the region since the first festival was held in 2022 as the only event of its kind in South Asia, AuroApaar’s production, ‘A State of Thirst’ became the sole Indian film selected for Dance on Camera (New York) and Cinedans (Amsterdam) this year and a honourable mention at the Platartistic Dance Film Festival in Barcelona.
