DIYdancer

In today’s world, we usually associate dance with youth and youth culture – a priceless commodity claimed by music, film, fashion, technology and more. Within any of these arenas there is little to no conversation around age or death. Quite the opposite, they are on the run from it. So what then, when we are faced with the unstoppable passage of time? They Saw the Sun First is a beautiful meditation on the question of aging.

As the genre of Screen Dance grows and evolves internationally, I am continually amazed by how new forms seem to appear simultaneously from some indefinable zeitgeist. During my tenure at Dance Camera West, I remember at least two years running during the early 2000s in which seemingly every other dance short submitted from near and far used an abandoned or dilapidated building as a location – a by now familiar visual trope.

Like music, dance is a language that exists before and beyond the structure of words and grammar. It can be at once instinctive, imaginative, and visceral. For me personally, dance is often at its best when it occurs without even the construct of an established movement genre, and when it displays a very thin line between the formal and the pedestrian.

A dance born at the Mexico-United States border fuels a recent work by Mexican-Chilean-Austrian choreographer Amanda Piña. “The dance was used to invent colonial difference – we must remember the modern world exists because of the plundering of others – it’s a very interesting dance, and through the years many people couldn’t get its complexity, and the dance was recorded as something where people had to represent their own defeat,” Piña told Exberliner Magazine.

After a digital presentation in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the international festival Tanz im August is back with indoor and outdoor shows all over Berlin, plus an exhibition, artist talk-backs, and some virtual performances. “A new hybrid city festival has emerged with exciting new indoor and outdoor venues,” artistic director Virve Sutinen said in a news release about the festival’s 33rd edition.

In 2021, Best Of, Critical Drafts /mag/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ddlogo-e1488589698488.png{ DIYdancer } Magazinehttps://diydancer.com/mag/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ffd21_a.i.m-by-kyle-abraham3_stephanieberger-scaled-e1634361539295.jpg200px200px Words by Celine Kiner | Images by Stephanie Berger New York turned out in fine form for City Center’s opening Fall for Dance program on Thursday night.

I love subtlety and nuance in dance. Whether on stage or screen, it can be a gift to an audience. “Here…” the dance maker seems to whisper… “Take this from me and feel, think, make of it what you will.” But I also love when a work – regardless of the art form – thunders into view, unabashedly, unapologetically true to itself, offering no narrative, no explanations for its existence, yet commanding you by sheer passion and irrationality to follow along.

/mag/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ddlogo-e1488589698488.png{ DIYdancer } Magazinehttps://diydancer.com/mag/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/screen-shot-2021-03-30-at-8.15.15-pm.png200px200px Whether screened on film or experienced live (although granted the latter is a rare occurrence these days), I am always interested in dance projects that invite viewers, without specific expectations or design, to see dance in new ways.