CCA presents Dance on Screen, a monthly film strand showcasing historical and contemporary dance works. An exciting line up of documentary, feature length and short dance films will tap into work by Scottish and international artists, as well as new commissions made for dance film festivals.

Running on the last Thursday of every month, the programme will explore a wide range of themes, looking at the work of dancers and choreographers working in collaboration with renowned directors, musicians, fashion designers, and visual artists. Look out for guest speakers, Q&As, critical debate and post-screening receptions.

July Line Up:



Dance, Music and Theatricality

As part of CCA’s Dance on Screen programme the July screening will focus specifically on artists’ films working with dance, music and theatricality. Films exploring the human figure’s presence in space and elements of theatrical staginess.

A loose grouping of artists’ films working with sequences of abstract performance, exploring a continual play between stasis and movement, collaborations between artists, choreographers and musicians.

Films will include works by Die Todliche Doris, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Planning to Rock, TORBJØRN RØDLAN, Lucienne Cole.

HENRY HILLS: MONEY
Starring: John Zorn, Diane Ward, Carmen Vigil, Susie Timmons, Sally Silvers, Ron Silliman, James Sherry, David Moss, Mark Miller, Arto Lindsay, Pooh Kaye, Fred Frith, Alan Davies, Tom Cora, Jack Collom, Yoshiko Chuma, Abigail Child, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews.
Money, an extremely condensed work unfolding upon multiple viewings, is a document of the state of contemporary performance practice among poets, musicians and dancers in New York in the early 80's. Filmed primarily on the streets of Manhattan for the ambient sounds and movements and occasional pedestrian interaction, to create a rich tapestry of swirling colours and juxtaposed architectural spaces in deep focus and present the intense urban overflowing energy that is experience living here. Discussion is fragmented into words and phrases and reassembled into writing. Musical and movement phrases are woven through this conversation to create an almost operatic composition. Copies in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Donnell Media Center Collection of the New York Public Library.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: 132 BPM
132 BPM, the fourth and most recent video work by the Oslo-based photographer Torbjørn Rødland. Best known for infusing a sense of unease, mystery and quietude into otherwise banal images - urban and natural landscapes, portraits, pets, the still life - Rødland's video work comes out of his desire to translate still photography into moving images.
Rodland's highly attuned eye for color, composition and the crispness of his imagery carries over to his video work, in particular to 132 BPM. BPM refers to beats-per-minute, and according to the artist, the intention was to "add a constant beat to the images - and not the beat of fast editing." In this piece, amid woods, waterfalls and a view of the sea, nature seems to delight in and dance to the music.
www.rodland.net

Planning to rock: Changes
Planning to Rock is the one-woman show if Janine Rostron (Berlin/Bolton/GB) a musician and filmmaker her music has been described as progressive pop opera with surreal hip hop attitude, Planning to Rock’s music has its own undeniable signature sound part Jarvis Cocker, part Wendy Carlos.
WWW.PLANNINGTOROCK.COM / WWW.MYSPACE.COM/PLANNINGTOROCK

Pil and Galia Kollectiv: Better Future (wolf shaped) 2008
The worshippers of the periphery fashion their own offerings to their modernist ancestors in the form of architectural models of their great monuments made of corn husk. These are ritually constructed and burnt against the backdrop of Celtic burial sites in Cornwall, as the group dons makeshift salad bowl and lampshade helmet. The ritual leads up to a choreographies homage to the square, a short dance routine juxtaposing Beckett’s television plays Quad I and II, Bruce Nauman’s Dance or Exercise on the Periphery of a Square (Square Dance) and industrial German band Die Todliche Doris’ song ‘Tanz im Quadrant’ . The transition between these two modes of sacrament sets up an aberrant chronology, destabilizing the temporal cohesion of the narrative as past utopia or future event.
http://www.kollectiv.co.uk/

Die Todliche Doris: Water Ballet. Berlin 1984
The Tödliche Doris dances a water ballet in a public swimming baths (Baerwaldbad, Berlin Kreuzberg). In red swimming suits and bathing caps which they had made themselves, and with special permission from the pool attendant. The body as ornament and decoration.

In Germany the synchronicity of the human body, synchronised sequences of movement carried out by crowds using the body as ornament, has negative associations, particularly because of the party convention events and grand Nazi rituals. Only since the incorporation of the GDR into the FRG marked the post war era, and reinforced by the Kosovo war and the building of the Holocaust memorial, increased numbers of people in Germany dare to form letters and patterns with their bodies without feeling guilty: PEACE, light chains or such things.

Only in sport did it seem possible for several human bodies to perform a certain series of synchronised movements apparently uninhibited, especially in synchronised swimming, or rather water ballet. And water ballet seemed to be the most American of all sports. Water ballet is reminiscent of Hollywood films, in which huge groups of swimmers with flowery bathing caps form perfectly synchronised ornaments and extensive patterns in the water. Patterns, which open, close, and rearrange themselves into new patterns. It seemed to The Tödliche Doris that the American water ballet with its alluring charm and its sirens trying to win the favour of the audience, would be the suitable West Berlin equivalent to the martial military engraved marches in the East part of the city. And furthermore, similarly serious and absurd.

STEPHEN SUTCLIFFE: SHOUT OUT ( WITH EL HOMBRE TRAJEADO )
Initially produced for Evil Eye is Source for the Shadazz label. A video for Glasgow band El Hombre Trajeado’s track “Shout out” in which the all film and sound is reversed except the diagetic title track. Bowlers move balletically and yet erratically against a back-drop of spinning, colourful lights, evoking dream-like sequences of choreographed contemporary dance.

Lucienne Cole: Dance to Music (Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now)
The core of Lucienne Cole's practice is centred around performance and video, exploring the extent to which popular culture forms and informs the contemporary psyche. Encompassing photography, drawing, writing and music, her work reflects and highlights the slippages between fantasy and reality in everyday life. Recent works have grown out of her love for popular music and its importance to her life and others', along with wider interests in popular culture and issues of identity, iconography, and sub-cultures such as mods and rockers, ballroom dancers, record collectors.
The performance 'Dance To Music' (2004-06) sees Cole tap dancing to The Smiths completely deadpan in a semi-amateur manner, with steps recalled from the tap classes she attended as a teenager. Cole uses herself as a tool, drawing from her past involvement with theatre and dance, knowing how to project parts of herself, how never to lose her own self in a character, and using costume in conjunction with the staging and creating of scenarios.

Tickets available from CCA box office on 0141 352 4900.

More Dance on Screen dates in 2008:

28 Aug
25 Sept
30 Oct
27 Nov