Dance at Animix 2013

Dance resists representation. Moving between extremes, at once abstract and intensely physical, dance elicits more questions than answers, an invitation to dialogue rather than statement. This year at Animix 2013, three short animated films by different artists take up this conversation, each with distinctive imagery and approach.

Ayaka Nakata‘s Cornelis evokes a sense of mystery and whimsy from the first. Elegantly dressed in red, complete with bowler hat, drawn with the bold black outline of comics, a tall thin man stands alone in an empty space, and invites us to share his secrets with a gesture: SHHHH…. One enters the intimacy of this world, with movement based on dance choreography, as it enters those realms accessible only via the imagination. In this place where the mind (and animation) makes everything possible, Cornelis (with music by Kaoru Ura) offers a delightful new perspective on Rimbaud’s: Je est un autre.

Cornelis will be shown in the program “A Decade of Animation“: August 10th at 22:30; August 13th at 17:00.

Nadia Micault‘s Sonata is a beautiful rendering of relationships between music and dance, between a woman and her thoughts/feelings, between the documentation of movement and the feeling of movement. The short animated film is based on choreography by Fernando Carrion Caballero, to a Sonata for Cello by Gyorgy Ligeti,  performed by cellist Dima Tsypkin and dancers Emilia Giudicelli and Fernando Carrion Caballero.
The very lines dance in this film, moving with expressive freedom from the precision of anatomical sketches to the evocative power of abstract, high tension scribbles, splashes of color, and wisps of smoky color. The imagery of the body reflects the emotional world of the dancer, appearing and disappearing, turning, leaping, curving  moving, struggling with her feelings. A woman made of muscle, bone and dreams. Entering this space is a man, who is and is not there. A hand appears and disappears, another figure in the frame, arms that lift her into the air.

Sonata will be shown in the program “International Animation #1”: August 9th at 16:30; August 12th at 20:00.

12 Sketches on the Impossibility of Being Still, directed and animated by Magali Charrier (who also did the sound design), creates a palimpsest of live action (DOP Fran Weston) and animation, the different elements working on and with the other to music composed and performed by Heather Truesdall and Natasha Zielazinski. On the dirty, leaf strewn floor of an abandoned room (the kind of place where student films thrive), two dancers (Selina Papoutseli and Tom Lyall) appear in fragmented, partial views: a torso with arms, feet, hands. Delicate minimal gestures contrast with line drawings and other effects – tearing apart and putting together the people and space, creating a sensibility of the mind in motion, ceaseless motion, even when the body appears at rest. A small gem-like  ode to the restless activity of mind and hands.

12 Sketches on the Impossibility of Being Still will be shown in the program “A Decade of Animation”: August 10th at 22:30; August 13th at 17:00.