Presented by Miami Light Project, ScreenDance Miami 2024 includes a series of screenings, panel discussions, and workshops centering on screendance, a dance choreographed explicitly for the camera, January 16-26 at various locations across Miami. Most events are free, with the exception of the programming at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) on January 20, which requires paid museum admission.
ScreenDance director and Miami-based choreographer Pioneer Winter attributes the longevity of this festival to the ingenuity of its organizers, international partners, and participating artists alike.
"I'm proud that we've lasted this long in a city of what's new and what's next. ScreenDance Miami has been able to remake itself, and we continue to reinvent. We haven't settled on just one way of doing things. We're always looking for new venues. We're always looking for new partnerships," they say. "This will be the first time in several years that we partnered with Cinedans Fest in the Netherlands, and that'll be the first time that the exchange is a reciprocal one. We shared films with them, and they shared films with us, and we each got to select. Our 'Celebrating Ten Years of Miami' program that we're doing at the Bandshell were films that were submitted to Cinedans for them to select and then share during their festival in the Netherlands in March. We also had a new partnership this year with Fifth Wall Film Festival, which is in the Philippines."
Winter says screendance, with its unique combination of physicality, emotionality, visual focus, and timing, is a contemporary art form that invites curious audiences of all backgrounds for a closer look.
"In a live performance on stage, through choreography, costume, lighting, and verbal direction, you can tell an audience to look at and pay attention to what you want them to, but ultimately, they can still decide to focus on what they want. With film, there's more of a direct focus. With dance, there's a physicality and emotion that really lends itself to film. Time is of incredible importance for both dance and film, maybe in a different way than in other art forms," Winter says. "Screendance provides a really unique means of artistic expression that resonates with a lot of audiences. It transcends languages and cultural barriers — it's access. Perhaps audiences who are attending ScreenDance Miami wouldn't normally go to a theater or to a live performance, but maybe this is an entry point."
On Saturday, January 20, at PAMM, ScreenDance will present its official selections, films culled from the festival's open call to artists and curated by a panel. This year, selections are separated into two programs: one focuses on filmmakers working from and with Florida's environments, and the other offers films from abroad. Winter says ScreenDance's curating team took care to highlight the wealth of distinctively South Floridian art being created within the Magic City.
"There are elements of ritual that I see often in Miami films that I find to be very Miami-specific. There's a way of approaching our relationship with nature, and with different sights and sounds in Miami, that I think comes through in the work," Winter says.
Among the films showing during the PAMM program, Memories of Future Past is a collaboration between Dale Andree, founder and director of National Water Dance, a project aiming to mobilize dancers from across the country and Puerto Rico to utilize movement in highlighting issues of water quality and climate change, and multidisciplinary artist Claudio Marcotulli. Andree says this film explores notions of time as it relates to the never-ending cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth.
"Like [the Miccosukee activist, educator, and grandmother to the Everglades] Betty Osceola says at the end of the film, different waters have a different sensibility. She feels the Everglades is a female being, and she's asking for our help. That really is at the essence of this: what time has done to the Everglades, what we continue to do to the Everglades, and looking at the next generation of what we'll be leaving if we don't take that more seriously and change our attitudes toward it," she says.
Andree and Marcotulli also serve as the creative duo behind 2019's Flickering Glades, which will be shown on Wednesday, January 24, at the Miami Beach Bandshell as part of ScreenDance's anniversary programming highlighting Miami artists' contributions to the festival's history. Flickering Glades utilizes long-exposure photography overlaid over video footage to create a living, breathing portrait of the Everglades.
"One of the things that Dale and I discussed during the making of this film is how one's perception of time feels different when one is in nature," Marcotulli says. "The body relaxes. The beauty of the environment captures the imagination and the mind. It was a challenge to portray this different sense of time. I was experimenting with long-exposure photography. What happens is that the shutter of the camera opens for three seconds, and whatever's happening in front of the camera is leaving a trace in the sensor. It's beautiful. If you see a dancer who may be moving part of her body but not all, you may see the face very sharply in focus, but maybe her arm has left a trace in the frame."
Hattie Mae Williams' Mother Of... explores humanity's participation in violence and the resulting impact on the Earth.
Hattie Mae Williams photo
"It's about how technology can be a thread, but it can also compartmentalize us and our emotions. On an abstract level, I was talking about the technology of trees: how the trees communicate through their roots and how it's a parallel to how we're connected through technology," she says.
Another of Williams' works, Mother Of..., will be projected in a larger-than-life format at the New World Center's Wallcast at Soundscape Park on Friday, January 26, as part of ScreenDance's "Films You Gotta See Big" series.
"This film was looking at how the earth elements absorb negative, violent energy and non-consensual violence, and how the elements bear witness and energetically feel what's happening and what we're doing," Williams says. "There's a universal thread in this work of what we put into the earth, do we get back. What are you offering, as opposed to what are you taking?"
In addition to five nights of film screenings, the 2024 iteration of ScreenDance Miami offers a two-day filmmaking workshop at the Light Box Studio at the Miami Theater Center. Led by Miami-based artist Enrique Villacreses, this workshop begins with basic techniques in composition, framing, lighting, sound, and post-editing, and it culminates with the hands-on opportunity to experiment in small teams of filmmakers. Winter says this workshop is applicable to those of all skill sets who desire to learn more about the screendance art form.
"We are looking to foster a community of new collaborations and new filmmakers, so we're hoping that this workshop attracts folks who maybe have been curious about screendance and haven't known how to start," Winter says. "You're going to walk away with actionable, easy ways of starting to implement screendance into your practice."
Winter says that after attending a film screening or workshop at ScreenDance, audiences may realize the omnipresent nature of dance and understand that their movements weave stories as beautiful and vital as those they've seen on screen.
"Dance is everywhere. Choreography is everywhere. Everything is perspective," Winter says. "We function in the world making involuntary decisions based upon our perspective — what is the foreground, the midground, and background — all the time. I'd like audiences to leave ScreenDance Miami just a little bit more aware of how a lot of things in life are a dance."
ScreenDance Miami 2024. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, January 16, through Friday, January 26, at various locations in Miami; 305-576-4350; miamilightproject.com. Admission is free, with the exception of programming at the PAMM, which requires museum admission.
