Review: Dance on Film by the Austin Dance Festival
by David Glen Robinson

Once again, Dance on Film (DOF), an annual feature of the Austin Dance Festival,presented a sampler of new, largely contemporary, dance from around the world. Work from as far away as the UK, Canada, and Hong Kong was shown to the delight of Austin’s dance community. The 2025 edition, presented Thursday, February 27th, at the Galaxy Theatres, central Austin, did not disappoint.

 

 

Ilana Wolanow, Jennifer Williams, and Lisa Kobdish co-produced Dance on Film for Austin Dance Festival and KDH Dance. The 2025 edition was especially welcomed by the dance community because the 2024 edition was not produced. That absence was for various reasons including the usual culprit, lack of funding. The luxury for Austin dance aficionados in 2025 was that we didn't have to travel around the world to enjoy the generous sample of thirteen dance stories. They were choreographed specially for video.

 

The difference between a stage dance and a dance choreographed for video is profound. The vision of a dance to be recorded for video orfilm must be shared between the choreographer and the videographer, and the shared complexities challenge both arts. The results are often sublime. A review of this scope, however, can be only highlight the highlights. It can't take an expansive view of all the recorded offerings. Even the also-ran videos not discussed here had qualities fit for fine arts viewing.

 

 

Another enjoyable aspect is filming on location. All thirteen had impressive locations; some were spectacular. Special mention goes to “Monday” from Hong Kong, which transitioned from a lone man on the tubes and trains of the inner city to a low, rocky beach on the South China Sea where the man was joined magically by companions also escaping the city. The scenario gave a special atmosphere to the company’s skilled contemporary dance on sand, water, and rocks. “Windowsill” played in three locations, where three different women danced the same dance, not always in unison. They were in a city rooftop setting, a suburban backyard, and a juniper scrubland (not unlike the environs of Santa Fe, N.M.). They were eventually brought together in a triple split-screen final section. Kudos to them and their video editor.

 

Relationships, age-old and universal, unite humanity.  “Chambers Street” is one such with a different take, the haunting memories of a break-up. A man goes about his day trying to forget, and his memory-ghost of the former loved one is there everywhere, across the bed from him, behind the bathroom door, and at the street vendor’s where he gets his breakfast. At last, he has an impossible but loving and passionate duet with the loved one, a memory dance, on a subway platform between train tracks, under the sign for Chambers Street. It was dance on video very well done.

 

“The Dance after the Last Dance” explores the intimacy of having lost a loved one, and gives us a culminating dance in flashbacks, the painful, grief-laden kind. Its emotional reach did not exceed its grasp.

 

“Into the Gamba-Verse” worked and played well with abstraction. Bruce Wood Dance Dallas ensembles danced against cgi backgrounds of shifting lights and flowing colors. The video and movement were flawless and seamless. Lumedia Musicworks is credited with the production. As the web programme stated: “Into the Gamba Verse blends Marin Marais’ Baroque music with modern dance.” The blend was harmonious, and we hope to see more of the cooperative efforts of the two artistic organizations.

 

But it wasn’t all love and tender sweetness. “F*ck to the Beat” took us out of the studio and our most intimate feelings to show us how dirty words and sexual depictions can be hilarious and leave us thoughtfully exhilarated and feeling not at all  filthy inside. A DJ starts something scratchy on his turntable and walks forward through a large ensemble and off camera as a voiceover seemingly in his own voice starts a very fast rap full of his favorite word. The ensemble fires into a complex hip hop dance with contemporary dance transitions and passages. The dancers were all highly talented and the editing cut the dance into several rapid-fire sections, all about u-know-what. When three couples simulated doggy style sex in unison (to the beat, of course), I thought, “Where can this thing go after that?” The soloist, barely staying in her overdone costume of streetwise mismatched tulle, lace, and leather, showed us. And forget it, there was no actual nudity. The piece had several expressions of hip-hop fashion in the costuming and the continuous in-your-face rap running from beginning to end. The dance had the power and the pride of hip-hop, its brilliance consisting of never looking back and thus leaving us wanting more of the outlandish costumes and improbable behavior. Even a square reviewer could finally snap to the dance as self-parody. But that realization led to another: that for us the dance was a privileged peek into inner urban tribal hip-hop culture. Its members are self-recognizing, having their own stars and leaders, fashions laden with signs and symbols, and art forms, notably graffiti murals and street art. And the subculture is not above putting on us poindexters. The hip-hop universe is a permanent fixture of American life; no one outside that culture can keep up with it; and “F*ck to the Beat” gave us a short, funny, and exemplary snapshot of the tribe.

 

“Tutu Academy” hailed from New York and Hong Kong, and the set locations seemed to be urban and scenic rural China. The cast was huge, Chinese ballet academy students and their teachers, all in tutus and colorful ballet garb, apparently during a gigantic Western-style ballet production. Deities, dragons, and heroes in garish styling and grotesque makeup held forth in tableaux flanked and backed by regiments of minions, all in theme colors, livery, and, of course, tutus. The epic was implicit, but it seemed to be an Eastern take on Western ballet mythology.

 

 

Into the scene dropped an alien from another world, a stereotypical little green man popping out of a stereotypical flying saucer complete with a glass dome cockpit. The academy paused the production long enough to show a brief montage of the visitor being taught the rudiments of ballet . Then the alien in his newly awarded green tutu returned to his home world with ballet, the summit achievement of Earth civilization, the storage compartment of his spaceship stuffed with green tutus. Outrageous!

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Dance on Film
by curated by Kathy Dunn Hambric Dance Company
Austin Dance Festival

At Galaxy Theatres, Austin, February 27, 2025