PLEASE NOTE that the film programme will become available online by July 22 or thereabouts..
All film synopses listed alphabetically by last name
Sarah Abbott • gestures toward Plant Vision • 10’09
Credits: Sarah Abbott – direction, camera, sound, editing Paco Calvo – narration / speaking on plant vision
Synopsis/description: A filmic meditation inviting consideration of perception in vegetal beings. Vision is somatic, of the body. In humans, vision is a dominant sense for most people and can feel indistinguishable from the mind when thoughts, judgements, and reactions are unconsciously triggered through visual experiences. Together, vision and mind can block deeper understandings of phenomena and lead to misinformed actions if intentionally looking beyond the illusory surface of things is not pursued. When we consciously imagine how plants might perceive in ways similar to and different than our own, humans extend beyond anthropocentric perception and behaviour to make space for empathetic relations with the aliveness of the vegetal world with whom we share life on the planet, and who, in turn, perceive humans via their own unique, botanically embodied ways of being. Perception and intelligence in plant life has been gaining scientific attention and recognition in recent decades. gestures toward Plant Vision offers a cinematic meditation on how plants might visually perceive their worlds and inspires viewers to consider other ways trees and plants, in all their varieties, might neurobiologically create images to see in stillness, motion, layers, form, colour, light, shadow, and/or time. The film’s audio in turn invites consideration of how plants might be aware of and perceive sound in their environments, and includes contemplation on the hypothesis of plant vision by Dr. Paco Calvo, a leader in philosophy of plant neurobiology, behaviour and signalling, and Principle Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the Universidad de Murcia, Spain. Once the human is finished speaking in the film, a quiet simplicity makes space for the plants and for inspirational contemplation on other ways plants might perceive visually and sonically. Imagery and sound for the film were collected and created at the Workshop on Art, Nature, and Technology 2016 led by plant scientist Dr. Stefano Mancuso and held at the garden home of Daniel Spoerri in Tuscany, Italy.
Beatrice Allegranti • Moving with the Trouble • 22’53
Synopsis/description: A dance film that draws directly from the Arts Council England, Surrey Arts and Public Health funded Moving Kinship project, and the internationally touring dance theatre production I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing. The transdisciplinary work evolves from my feminist new materialist choreography, psychotherapy, scholarship and activism with people living with rare young onset dementia, their families and the artistic team Beatrice Allegranti Company. Since its inception in 2016, the project has spanned the deaths of three parents in the artistic team, and a pandemic. Through our dispossessions, this film explores how we have touched the alterity within, inviting audiences to move with us as we move with the trouble. I will discuss the choreographic assemblage and how the film, and the work that informs it, invites a transcorporeal tangling of movement with/in dementia and wider social, political and environmental inequalities of loss, voice, intimacy, vulnerability, destruction and care. In doing so, I propose that Moving with the Trouble tunes our attention to micro-activisms present in movement exchange as we show up to collective understandings of the reterritorialization of power and privilege in more-than-human ways.
Lucy Cash • Winterage: Last Milk • 21’30
Credits: A film by Lucy Cash and Mark Jeffery
Performer: Mark Jeffery Costumes: Grace Duval
Text: Judd Morrissey & Lucy Cash Animation: Melody Li
Camera & edit: Lucy Cash
Sound mix: Alistair Murray
Synopsis/description: The thousand-year history of a dairy farm in rural Derbyshire, folds around the life of queer Chicago-based artist, Mark Jeffery.
Returning to his childhood home in December 2019 to memorialise personal loss, and extending his body via the wearable sculptures of Grace Duval, Mark’s choreography brings forward the mineral and animal in all of us within a film composition that considers connections between human and more than human and between place, language, loss and movement.
“Uncanny and unlike anything I’ve experienced before. The film brings so many different agencies together and distributes them (human/nonhuman, physical body, animated body, physical landscape, animated landscape, text, physical sound, mediated sound, song). These are all inseparable from personal/social history, pop cultures and hidden cultures, queer cultures, wild/unbounded space, confined space, climate change…” Lin Hixson (Every House Has A Door)
Lucy Cash & Simone Kenyon • How The Earth Must See Itself (A Thirling) •
information to come
Judy Cole • Beached • 6’54
Credits: Players: Andrew Carey, Judy Cole, Haley Marshall, Keith Miller
Poems: 1 and 3 Judy Cole
Poem 2: Andrew Carey
Clarinet: Haley Marshall
Camera operators: Steven Hopkins, Dave West
Editing: Judy Cole, Roger Hillier
Thank you to Move into Life Project Group 2021 for sandcastles Enormous thanks to Sandra Reeve
Dedicated to Suprapto Suryodarma
Synopsis/description: This will be a 15-minute film of a live movement art piece, featuring four human figures on Charmouth Beach, Dorset. [The footage is all recorded but the film is still being edited.] The inspiration came from my vacillating feelings towards climate change: my desire to act; my sadness and frustration at our collective ineptitude; and the more philosophical approach to impermanence, which can allow me to gracefully accept the situation and find a way through. The performance is based on movement that emerges in each moment and is not choreographed. The movement reflects the weather, tides, wildlife and the players’ own understanding in this ever-changing environment. The first part of the film represents the stark reality of climate change as four figures stand in plastic rubbish sacks in the rainy, desolate seascape. As the tide flows in, it crumbles sandcastle cities and is accompanied by moving figures also slowly dissolving. In the second part, as the sun comes out, a lone figure walks into the waves, finding a way to come to terms with this reality, to accept it and to surrender to it without giving up. We see the figure finding a way to adapt to the process of crumbling and decay. Rocked and shaken by the incoming waves, the figure discovers: The cadence of kindness is in the undertow
Laura Cooper • Lessons in Leadership • 13’10
Credits: Camera: Laura Cooper, Joseph Potts
Sound ; Laura Cooper, Jason von Hockman
Editing: Laura Cooper
Performers: Carolyn Morton, Laura Cooper
Horse Trainer: Lisa Brice, Horses for Courses
Horses; Randy, Wilson and Wild ponies Long Mynd, Shropshire With special thanks to Bruntwood Works and Grand Union Gallery
Synopsis/description: Lessons In Leadership explores the potential and problematics of EAL (Equine Assisted Learning) where horses are used as training tools in corporate and business leadership programs. Although horses could have a lot to teach us about embodied learning, awareness and more horizontal leadership structures, the video questions the problematics of appropriating and translating another animal into human capitalist systems and power structures. This video is the result of a year of documentary research with EAL facilitators, filming wild welsh mountain ponies and embodied training in forms of horse whispering and is part of a larger body of work explore human horse place relationships.
Anna Dako • Forest Within • 24’00
information to come
Izabella Finch • Womb River • 9’59
Credits: A film by Isabella Shirley-Miller aka Izabella Finch
Synopsis/description: An experimental music-dance film. A prayer of rememberence. An audio-visual poetry weaving mythology, biology & ecology, in celebration of the life-death-life cycles of female physiology.
Marina Guzzo • Mixture #1 •
Credits: Proposition and research : Marina Guzzo
Guest photographer : Gui Galembeck
Interns : Giulia Sales Nascimento da Silva / Alice Iassia
Extensionist Body Arts Project : Marcela da Silva Lopes
Scientific Initiation: Flávia Pavani
Master student: Kidauane Regina
Graphic art: Julia Valiengo
Participating women:
Armada Elisa Andrade Belizário / Brunna Talita Rodrigues / Fernanda Buongermino Vilela / Fernanda dos Santos Camara Melo / Joyce Nunes Souza / Júlia Rafaela Andrade Belizário / Karla Cristina Silva / Layla Alves Cardoso Vieira / Marília Guarita / Maria CLara Franco Baron / Nalva Andrade dos Anjos / Nina Pusch/ Rita de Cassia Utida/ Silmara Franco Baron/ Thayna/ Cairu Teles Lira/ Viviane de Macedo Pepice
Production: Marina Guzzo
Research platform: Lab Corpo y Arte UNIFESP
Institutional Partnership and co-realization: Instituto Procomum
Synopsis/description: Mixture is a workshop that proposes an assembly game from elements that you have at hand. The workshop intends to forge a ritual between women and plants, and to think about a choreographic mixture – as a play on the words used by the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia (2018) that suggests a metaphysics of the mixture. Making alternative dance/choreography from interspecific, feral, non-human worlds as a form of resistance to the Anthropocene/Plantationcene/Capitolocene, bringing together perspectives that point to cosmopolitics from other ways of being in the world: stem, roots, sap, leaves, flowers and fruits. A choreography by women interested in finding possible alliances between clothes, objects and plants. “Affective alliances”as Ailton Krenak would say, based on improbable daily life. Kinships and impossible neighborhoods. Transform to make other arrangements and imagine futures and counter-domestication rituals.
Tania Haberland • A Will • 5’23
information to come
Tania Haberland • Cloud Mountains • 4’44
made with Poetics of Reverie
information to come
Tania Haberland • Night Rain • 1’11
information to come
Laura Harrington • Fieldworking • 29’29
Originally shot on 16mm
Credits: Co-commissioned by Tyneside Cienema (Projections) and MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art). Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Additional support from Natural England, Northumbria University and The Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Made in collaboration with Chris Bate, Ludwig Berger, Sarah Bouttell, Luce Choules, Simone Kenyon, Fiona MacDonald (Feral Practice), Lee Patterson, Meredith Root-Bernstein and Moor House-UpperTeesdale National Nature Reserve.
Synopsis/description: Six artists, an ecologist and two filmmakers spend five days together in an off-grid location surrounded by moorland and blanket bog. Camping on the former site of an important scientific field station in Moor House-Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve, they explore ways to comprehend, inhabit and work within the context of this remote and ‘wet’ location.
Fieldworking meditatively interweaves footage and field recordings from this journey – the direct interactions and spontaneous encounters between artists and land – to capture the multiple adaptations and shared moments that occurred.
Eva Jack • Whale Watching • 10’13
Synopsis/description: ‘Whale Watching’ follows the personal tale of an unfulfilled desire of seeing a living whale. Having never seen this creature for themself, the narrator is forced to look through the eyes of others, assembling fragments of found footage in an attempt to construct a picture of the elusive animal.
Using observation, imagination, recollection and research as methods for storytelling ‘Whale Watching’ draws upon the multiplicity of the whale’s existence; from museum specimen to stranded on the beach. The story journeys through the body of the whale examining each part like an autopsy, although not trying to determine a cause of death but instead to gain an understanding of how the animal lives. Finally arriving at the head of the animal, the narrator comes eye to eye with the whale – albeit through the screen – offering a moment to reflect on the motives for the act of looking itself.
The film’s soundtrack is an original score, combining whale sound found on the internet and field recordings from the beach where Eva Jack witnessed a stranded whale as a child. These sounds are merged with analogue synthesisers and personal narration, producing a soundscape that traverses the past and present in mysterious ways.
Beatrice Jarvis • rince / damsha / macnas: the space between
information to come
Ellen Jeffrey • On the Patterns We Gaze • 9’01
Credits: Film & Edit: Jonny Randall
Dancers: Jenny Reeves, Lucy Starkey, Aimee Williamson
Sound: Lisa Whistlecroft & Steve Benner
Costume: Katie Duxbury
Synopsis/description: On the Patterns We Gaze is a time-specific choreography by Ellen Jeffrey. Filmed in Grubbins Wood (Cumbria) in March 2019, the performance takes place in the last of the light, spanning a site’s durational shift through nightfall. The work was performed by Jenny Reeves, Lucy Starkey and Aimee Williamson, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and supported by Lancaster University and Cumbria Wildlife Trust.
Regina Kadauane • Work & Coffee •
Synopsis/description: Performance is a way of inscribing knowledge. Inspired by Leda Martins’ term of “oraliture”, performance is also a concept and methodology to materialize an unwritten story. We inscribe in the performance “Trabalho&Café” (Work&Coffee) the oral history of a woman, born and raised in the rural context, meeting with work and an urban-capitalist way of life. The denunciation of salaried work as a continuation of the long colonial exploration brings us to the reflections of Harari (2018), a reference bibliography for performance. By making a projection on the world of work and its new morphologies, the author observes and predicts the aggravation of a mass of people not absorbed by the labor market in constant informational updating, thus, the mechanisms of control and domination deepen as the impoverishment and pauperization in the digital age are consolidated. Coffee, in the Brazilian context, was a major economic milestone in its production cycle, becoming one of the main factors in the enrichment of southeastern Brazil and modernizing the mechanisms of exploitation. Coffee is a cultural trait of Brazilian families, and, in the performance, it is the grain that represents the cycle of exploited work, the absence of the right to enjoy what results from the workforce of men and women, the contestation and awareness of the reproductive cycle of poverty. The performance is recorded and available on digital platforms, and can be accessed at any time, free of charge. Coffee takes up the long history of a country that comes into existence as the backyard of colonial interests, as well as the common history of migrant families, expelled from the countryside, in search of survival in the alienating “civility” of capitalist cities. “Civility” is the mark of the split between body and nature, based on the exploitation of land and people on the periphery of the capitalist system.
Claire Loussouarn • This urban wild field in Hackney Marshes • 17’37
Synopsis/description: In the heart of the capital, Hackney Marshes are an oasis of country fields which have been spared from development as a common land. The field behind the Lee Valley Ice Centre is a shelter for so-called weeds, dandelion, nettle, mugwort, plantain, cleavers, cow parsley, yarrow, and many others, which happily thrive and cohabit in the patches of unmown grass. This is where we found our habitat, in the most fervent weed jungle and uneven ground to the feet, mostly avoided by by-passers unless they intentionally want to hide and laze around among the high grass on a sunny day. Claire rooted her movement practice in this spot in 2017 and saw it grow and blossom when she started to collaborate with Dominique in 2018. Each month of the year and throughout the seasons they meet. Claire moves. Dominique resonates. The accompanying film is a first glimpse into the accumulated (and still being filmed) material which is currently being shaped into a four screen installation. The film is intentionally slowing down the act of vision in order to invite the viewer to appreciate what is missed by fast-forwarding in editing. Repetition encourages paying attention and getting lost in the screen: what looks the same is never quite the same and differences become noticeable through correlation. The film could start from any shot as it is meant to be played on loop to further emphasise the cycle of seasons. An embodied way of filming is prioritised. Dominique’s body behind the camera is intentionally not hidden but kept present through its tiny movements, unexpected responses, or lengthy focus adjustments, what could be seen as ‘mistakes.’ The frame of Dominique’s body is breathing through the camera’s frame as she is tuning and responding to Claire’s movement, herself tuning and responding to the space. Through Dominique’s eyes, Claire’s body on screen becomes a plant among other plants. It endures the inevitable cycle of the seasons and the whims of the weather. Each episode is a small window on its growth and decline and their variations in between from gestation through unpredictable outbursts to full dropping. Her moving body invites the viewer to notice how their own body is also entangled with their immediate environment: it is only a matter of receiving what is already there. The film aims to re-awaken a dormant kinesthetic knowing and relating to ecological aliveness in and around us. It does so by encouraging a kinesthetic way of watching where the whole body, not just the eyes, is invited to nurture a state of receiving. The spaciousness of the film allows the viewer to attune to the subtle and ongoing unravelling of time within the microcosm of this urban wild field in Hackney Marshes. By focusing our kinesthetic attention through a frame it extends our ecological awareness beyond the film.
Heather McKnight • The Swamp Project (an introduction) • 4’12
information to come
Rachael Mellors • Illuminations • 5’00
Credits: A film made in collaboration with Pete Hudson
The film ‘Illuminations’ documents my intuitive creative response to my immersive and embodied relationship with the natural living world.
Filmed in an olive grove and on a seashore in Greece, artistic practice is rooted in Earth’s cycles and processes, in synchronicity with the seasons, the sun rising and the ecological and geological processes of erosion and regeneration.
The film shows my exploration of materiality through somatic relationship and a deep appreciation of nature. It is part of a project exploring ecological sustainability and the principles of the circular economy in artistic practice. I recognise that a more deeply bonded relationship with the natural world is needed as a catalyst for ecological recovery, alongside political and collective action.
Pete Hudson made a film record of my creative process which is the source of the content. He recorded the audio and edited the digital and moving images. The concept, design and script of the film are a collaboration.
Yzabellah Samahra-Rose • Blood Scent • 5’00
Synopsis/description: In this piece of Dance-Theatre Yzabelaah takes us on a journey within ourselves to meet the threshold that we stand upon at this time of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In Blood Scent we are asked to reflect on themes of natural life and artificial life and our place in the unfolding of things. Set under canopy of trees, we see a woman at home in the natural environment, when an intruder arrives and threatens everything we are given pause for thought to reflect on our responsibilities and the trajectory that is set for future generations. Deeply embodied, Yzabelaah takes us on a kinaesthetic journey that touches our hearts and leaves images resonating within our bodies. She is storyteller, singer and dancer.
Cherie Sampson • Substance of Vision • 11’11
Credits: Created/directed by: Cherie Sampson
Camera: Cherie Sampson & Radim Schreiber
Musical elements: Charles Gran
Performance & all other production and audio + video post-production: Cherie Sampson
Synopsis/description: A group of Australian researchers (Duffy, Sorolla, et. al) recently discovered that the active substance in honeybee venom, melittin, has demonstrated a capacity to induce cell death in two types of aggressive breast cancers: triple-negative and HER2. Triple negative breast cancer is often described as “deadly” and many TNBC patients don’t respond well to conventional chemotherapy. As a survivor of triple negative breast cancer, I understand well the experience of grappling with the disease. The drug cocktail I had worked for me but dawning new therapies offer hope for alternatives to toxic and often ineffectual treatments that have not changed for decades.
In the summer of 2021, the gardens, prairies, orchard, woodlands on the organic farm where I live set the mise-en-scène for a series of “stinging rituals” over a period of several months in active participation in the bee’s instinctual performance. It was both a symbolic act calling attention to the need for more natural cancer therapies as well as (perhaps) a form of prophylactic healing… would a little bit of melittin destroy any rogue cells that may still be wandering in my bloodstream? Documentary footage of the changing nectar and pollen foraging patterns of honeybees and other native pollinators illustrates the diverse life and vitality in healthy environments and ecosystems.
Tyler Smith • D’ancestry – an invocation • 5’29
Synopsis/description: D’ancestry emerged from a group project in the Engaged Ecology MA at Schumacher College. We formed around our love of dance and our interest in the place that dance holds culturally, spiritually and conceptually for individuals and communities around the globe. The journey was expansive, and spilled into a report, and a film. The report was led by Rae Johnson’s work on Embodied Social Justice that grew into an exploration of the place that dance holds in the freedom practices of marginalised people; and finally we explored what dance means to continual transcorporeal worlding-with. Riffing off of Stacey Alaimo and borrowing from Astrid Neimanis, we found dance could awaken the hydrocycles we are bound to, our bodies of water not fixed nor boundaried, but messy and expansive, spilling over and wet. This fundamental
porosity to the more-than-human and to each other were the brackish boundaries from where we created this film, this invocation. D’ancestry refers to those who danced before us and to those who dance with us. As playful as it is serious, d’ancestry speaks to the way movement gives life to relationships, and how dancing together might be the performance necessary for what Donna Harraway might call becoming-with the rest of our kin.
Grace Surman • A Film with Hope • 11’00
information to come
Lizzie Sykes • Are You There • 11’56
Credits: Dancer: Louise Tango
Synopsis/description: Lizzie Sykes was awarded a residency at Mottisfont, a National Trust property and gardens in Hampshire – a place where artists have met and made work for hundreds of years. ‘Are You There’ is a piece made at that residency inside the house. It’s performed by Louise Tanoto, and is a response to how it feels to be alone in the house, to be inescapably linked to it yet private: free from expected codes of physical behaviour such a space represents. It’s about cycles of being, and perhaps, of being stuck indoors.
How we distort and manage time is key in this film: being seen or camouflaged, preserved or edited out. How some slices of history are visible to us over time, and others are quieter, unresolved stories. As visitors, are we part of this shifting flux of presence and interpretation. There is a 900 year old abbey encased within the walls of the building and, if you open a cupboard in the dining room, a key location in the film, you can see an arch of the abbey, completely intact, like a bone in a body. At the time of the residency, contents of cupboards were being cleared out for archiving and curation. All kinds of objects that had been in storage were uncovered: from collections of stuffed animals to teapots. The film is painterly: graded using Chiaroscuro influences, at points it looks like it could be a moving part of the collection. The dancer is the embodiment of this feeling of perpetually performing, or being trapped: a beautiful but unsettling world.
Scott Thurston • Terraces • 8’13
Credits: Performer Scott Thurston
Poetry & Choreography Scott Thurston Camera & Sound Maria Andrews Editor Maria Andrews
Special thanks Billie Hanne
Synopsis/description: Terraces is a film made by London-based poet and filmmaker Maria Andrews in the Autumn of 2021 on location in Salford and Manchester in collaboration with poet and dancer Scott Thurston. It brings together a series of live-composed kinepoetic performances out-of-doors and in the studio, reworking a single, embodied poem-dance from the sequence Terraces: a choreography (Beir Bua Press, 2022) alongside extemporised text and movement. The film draws on both artists’ extensive studies with the Belgian dancer-poet Billie Hanne. All vocalised material was made in the moment as depicted, without overdubs. For a conversation between Andrews and Thurston at the time of the film-shoot, see episode 1 of Andrews’ podcast series Chthonic.
Miranda Whall • Woolly Maggot • 6’05
Credits: The film Woolly Maggot is by documentary filmmaker Rhys Thwaites Jones of Fforest Films
Synopsis/description: During the summer and autumn of 2017 artist Miranda Whall crawled 5.5 miles through the bio- diverse Cambrian Mountains in West Wales wearing a sheep fleece and 14 GoPro cameras. This multi – platform, interdisciplinary project tells the story of a mountain where the narrative is told from the legs, arms, hands, head, back, stomach and mouth of a human / sheep, highlighting that each have shaped the upland landscape we see today and both have a role to play in shaping its future.
Crystal Zillwood • Metamorphosis • 9’49
Credits: Filmed & edited Dan Canham https::www.stillhouse.co.uk/dan-canham- Music Otis Jones https://otisjonesmusic.co.uk/
Synopsis/description: A short dance film inspired by the process of life,death,life cycles. Artistic vision Crystal Zillwood crystalzillwood.co.uk
Thank you to Arts Council England for their support.