[COMMA] MOV:MENT Lab x Jumping Frames: Dance Film Exhibition

Spring
Nature wakes up
Birds dancing
After the wedding dances follow autumn
Humans are lost, locked for
That kind is The Dance of Life

The Dance of Life documents the dancers of the Helsinki Youth Society performing an old Viennese-Karelian wedding dance, juxtaposed to the dance of birds, composing a symphony of nature.  It also reflects the director’s connection to humanity in the state of his mind in 1975’s Finland.

Director: Markku LEHMUSKALLIO (Finland)

PEPE (Moth Dances) is a short film fusing taonga pūoro, contemporary dance, and digital art. Featuring Nancy Wijohn as a solo traveller embodying Hineraukatauri, the work draws on the cocoon-like form of the pūtōrino and the case moth as metaphors for transformation.

Silk, breath, and mycelial webs shape a sensory journey through ancestral memory and future vision. The project is a ritual of sound, motion, and spirit, rooted in Te Ao Māori and resonating across time.

Director: Daniel BELTON (New Zealand)

Traditionally, women in Igbo speaking parts of Nigeria, came together to protest the behaviour of men by sitting on or making war on them by adorning themselves with palm fronds, dancing and singing protest songs outside the man in question’s home . This practice became infamous due its prominence as a tactic in the Aba Women’s War, the 1929 all woman protest against colonial rule. Two contemporary dancers reimagine the practice, drawing on both archival research and their own experiences.

Director: Onyeka IGWE (United Kingdom)

BOOKANIMA, a compound word of ‘Book’ and ‘Anima’, is Experimental Animation to give new cinematic life to books. It aims to create ‘Book Cinema’ in the third scope between Book and Cinema by Chronophotography Animation, paying homage to Edward Muybridge and Entienne-Jules Marey.

BOOKANIMA experiments Chronophotography Animation about Dance along with dance flow: Ballet-Korean Dance-Modern Dance-Jazz Dance-Aerial Silk-Tap dance-Aerobic-Disco-Break Dance-Hip Hop-Social Dance.

Director: Shon KIM (Korea)

Imperial Reminiscence is a cinematic voyage of misguided desire (illegitimate and guilt-free) that traverses fantasies of cultural otherness. It reviews the historical and ongoing Western narrative of whitewashing in Hollywood films and brings attention to these racial transgressions that continue to oppress non-hegemonic bodies through her acts of mimesis and green-screening, to sample popular culture and colonial imagery in playful and humorous ways.

Director: Caroline GARCIA (Australia)

Unbearable Darkness Game Demo is an experimental third-person, non-action, docu-adventure game inspired by the afterlives of Butoh dance master Tatsumi Hijikata. It is a recollection of thoughts, movements and expeditions into the world of Butoh. How does the digital, the virtual, the immaterial or non-human expressions collapse and expand the notion of wandering.

Unbearable Darkness Game Demo wanders into a capsule of paranormal dance experience, of speculative documentary and rendered dreams.

Director: CHOY Kar Fai (Germany, Japan)