Kinodance Creates Multi-sensory Performance
KEENE, N.H., 1/27/10 - Kinodance Company will use dance, film, set, lighting, and sound to create a cinema stage performance on Wednesday, February 17, at 7:30 p.m. at the Redfern Arts Center on Brickyard Pond at Keene State College. Tickets for this performance, which merges the boundaries between dance, cinema, and visual art, range from $27 to $11.
In addition to this performance, Kinodance founder and filmmaker Alla Kovgan will present a lecture on “Choreographing Cinema” on Thursday, February 18, at 7 p.m. in the Redfern’s Putnam Arts Lecture Hall. The lecture will be followed by the screening of two of Kovgan’s films: Movement Revolution Africa, a documentary, and NORA, an art film. The lecture and films are free and open to the public.
“Choreography of elements” is the term that Kinodance uses to describe their creative process. In their performances, each element (dance, cinema, set, sound) is a strong, fully developed score that compliments the others - sometimes soloing, sometimes partnering, sometimes driving a tight ensemble. Kinodance will perform two dances that show the troupe’s passion for kinetic arts, experimentation, and a strong belief in interdisciplinary collaborations.
Denizen, a 60-minute performance, pays homage to Armenia, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, with the choreography inspired by cinema created in that country. Five dancers, or denizens, each with a distinct personality, mold movement, light, images, sets, and sounds to orchestrate a cycle of haiku, to transmit the mythical and ritualistic qualities of a land and its people. The Boston Herald lauded Denizen as “lush and sensual, mysterious and vivid, formally sophisticated and painterly.”
Fuse is a 25-minute choreography of light and color inspired by silent cinema and the contemporary film Blade Runner. Four dancers move around inside a giant gauze-covered box, inspired by the lumia box, a 1920s unit with a screen that looks like a television set. The Boston Globe says of Fuse that “elements have been so carefully blended that what happens is mesmeric. A breathtaking synthesis of live and filmed dance.”
The lecture “Choreographing Cinema” journeys through the history of cinema from early silent films to music videos and discusses choreography on screen. Kovgan, a Boston-based filmmaker who helped start Kindodance in 1999, looks at current and historic tendencies, attitudes, and approaches of the film world to dance. She will address how looking at cinema through the choreographic lens could bridge between the film and dance worlds and demonstrate the tremendous potential of dance film collaborations.
The lecture will be followed by the screening of two of Kovgan’s films that explore contemporary African dance performers and choreographers. Movement Revolution Africa is a documentary that looks at African artists, who see themselves as part of the whole world, not the “Third World,” and, while proudly African, refuse to be marginalized as “African Dancers.” NORA, based on the life of Zimbabwean-born dancer Nora Chipaumire, is part biopic, part fable, part dramatic cinema, and part dance film.
Funding for Kinodance is provided in part by the Arts Jobs program of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
To request accommodations for a disability, please call the Redfern Arts Center at least two weeks before the performance. For further information about the performance, lecture, and film screening, call the box office, 603-358-2168, or visit www.keene.edu/racbp, where you can view video clips of Kinodance and other upcoming performances at the Redfern Arts Center.
