Contemporary dance on screen
The Eighth International Videodance Festival of Buenos Aires included a number of high-profile collaborations with visiting artists from Mozambique, Canada and Britain. There were also visitors from Sweden, Brazil and Cuba, plus forums and master classes.
Edition Day 31st December 2006
By Jenny March
For the Herald
This December Buenos Aires has been bursting with videodance-making talent. Early in the month we had the Eighth International Videodance Festival of Buenos Aires, founded and organized by Silvina Szperling. Together with screenings, the festival included a number of high profile collaborations with visiting artists from Mozambique, Canada and Britain. There were also visitors from Sweden, Brazil and Cuba, plus forums and master classes. Each day was filled with video material from all over the world, including a complete retrospective of work by Lloyd Newson’s DV8 (UK) and a screening of Pina Bausch’s tender and dignified 2002 documentary, Damen und Herren AB 65 (Ladies and Gentleman, 65 years and upwards).
This year’s festival focused on Argentina’s number one videodance artist, Margarita Bali, including a retrospective of her work, a new installation, master classes on dance and new technologies and the premiere of her new video.
Bali, who won the prestigious Aristotle Onassis prize in 2001, always seems slightly surprised by her own success, even though she has worked steadily and consistently over the years, following her line of research and creation in the manner of a scientific artist. Originally a biology major, she turned to studying dance and visual arts at Berkley University, US, and later videomaking and interactive technologies. She was cofounder of the renowned Núcleodanza company, with which she danced and created over 35 choreographies, before immersing herself in the world of new technologies in the early 90s. She is, without doubt, a consummate artist, streaks ahead of everyone else in her field here in Argentina.
In her master classes she showed what you can do with computer programming, projection and movement. Particularly, she looked at video projection with live dance (explored in Naufragio in Vitro with the videos Agua, Arena and Planos de Contacto and subsequent installations, between ’97 and 2001) and “Motion Capture”, a new technology which permits the dancer to generate sounds or projections by moving before a sensor (activated by her dancers, together with live and pre-recorded video projections in her brilliant and daring Ojo al Zoom, 2004).
Bali gave fascinating insights into technical challenges in the making of the prize-winning Pizzurno Pixelado. “The idea of giving a year of my life to a project that would evaporate in one night only was disquieting,” she comments, since this large scale, one-off event (given as part of the last BA International Theatre Fest one freezing night in 2005) took months to prepare. The entire façade of the Palacio Pizzurno (Ministry of Education and Culture) was transformed into an enormous moving projection, as virtual dancers hung from, tangoed and salsa danced across the windows and balconies whilst live dancers moved inside.
In order to preserve the fruits of that night, Bali created Pizzurno Revisitado, an installation shown at the festival, which recreates this extraordinary event by means of a perfectly executed scale model onto which the projections are made in miniature. The effect is magical, the inanimate model coming to miraculous life for twenty five minutes.
Paredes de Aquel Buenos Aires (The Walls of the Buenos Aires of Yore) is Bali’s new video, a development of the discoveries made in Pizzurno. The video takes a humorous look at interiors and exteriors of old buildings, populating them with a variety of eccentric dancer personalities. There are buildings in a state of semidemolition, with exposed walls showing the skeleton of architectural layout into which Bali inserts fragments of moving scenes, almost an indictment of the speed with which “the Buenos Aires of yore” is being “rubbed out” by a newer, greedier BA.
Rogue Talent only Three Blocks Away
Simultaneously but apart from the Videodance Fest, showing only three blocks away in a bar-resto, was an impressive debut video by Silvina Cortés. Cortés, one of the foremost talents in the Teatro San Martín’s Contemporary Ballet Company, has turned her hand to conceiving and directing videodance for the first time. The result is a slick and professional first production called Dame Vidrio (Give Me Glass). Cortés had the good judgment to surround herself with first-rate lighting camera and art department talent and also uses a handful of the best dancers from the BCTSM, performers who are not afraid to experiment and act.
She asserts she had a very clear idea of the piece beforehand, wanting to work on small, intimate details of gestures and facial expressions — minutiae lost in a stage setting — but for which video is perfect. Her idea was to create a sort of 50’s retro kitsch, using bolero (a popular song style of that time) as a starting point. Searching for suitable locations, she settled on “Roots 1745” on Mitre Street, a bar with an impressive stained-glass wall, the backdrop for her Dame Vidrio. Her decision to hold her premiere screening in the same bar and alongside this same coloured glass wall had a touch of genius, immersing her audience in a total experience.
A handful of famous and not so famous boleros by artists like Chavela Vargas, Los Cocineros, Eydie Gormé and others, give the musical background for a series of humorous, surreal and grotesque situations enacted by a seedy cast of characters and including a macho game of dominoes and a scene danced with comical ceramic Pingüinos (penguin-shaped jugs) once used for serving wine. These theatrical ingredients are choreographed together with excellent comic timing, using a mixture of pedestrian and dance movement.
Fusion Videos in Tercer Cambalache
With alternative tango, dance and theatre, the annual, week-long Cambalache festival which takes place in mid December, is one of the most interesting, recent cultural events in BA.
This year one of the highlights was a screening of videos by today’s talents, including: Past Bedtime, Chicho Frumboli and Eugenia Parrilla in a video by Kristin Hauksdottir, domestic simplicity, dancing tango in a scantily furnished room; Sobremesa, Margarita Bali again (elaborating the patio table scene from Paredes de aquel Buenos Aires); the wonderful Tangolpeando, interweaving the eponymous modern tango band with some fabulous “tango nuevo” dancing, by Cristina Cortés (no relation) and Martín Foronda, and footage of BA’s “cacerolazos” (pot-banging protests during the 2001 socioeconomic crisis); and the funny Igor (European product and sense of humour), its collage of footage includes Igor Stravinsky conducting Gotán Project (in perfect synch).
Since the festival is open to experimentation and new ideas, it’s to be expected that the standard of work will be uneven, but overall the spirit of renovation and adventure is there, which augurs well for the future.
Jenny March - Dance & Music Reviews 