Sans Souci at Museum of Boulder: 19th Annual Festival Premiere

In-Person Screening with Live Performance and Installations
Fri-Sun, Sept 2- 4, 2022

On the Rooftop at Museum of Boulder

Join Sans Souci for a night to remember as we return to The Museum of Boulder to celebrate the opening of our 19th season!
You’ll enter like a star through a VIP red carpet photo area…it is a film festival, after all! Grab a local brew or glass of wine, and check out the virtual reality dance film and the video installations looping throughout the Museum before the screening for an intimate experience with select films. Take a peek at the Museum’s open exhibits, and delight in the surprise of live dance performance around every corner on your way to pick up your pre-purchased burrito bowls on the rooftop patio.
The main event will begin at 7:30pm as we embark on a screening of our new season’s top scoring dance films. As always, our selections are submitted from around the world and curated by a panel of professional dance filmmakers to bring you the most cutting edge work in the realm where dance and cinema collide. All these films are making their SSF debut, and tickets must be purchased in advance.

| Festival Premiere: Sneak Peek Installation | Festival Premiere: Installation | Festival Premiere: Screening |

SSF Installation Sneak Peek

Before We Turned to Stone, 2022, United States, 4 min

Directed by Claudia Anata Hubiak

Produced by Mark Ragan

Featuring Choreographer: Claudia Anata Hubiak, Dancers: Carly Hambridge and Makaila Wallace

"Before We Turned To Stone" portrays the manifestation of mind chatter and how enticing it can be to stay busy, avoid the stillness and believe our thoughts.

Gusts, 2022, United States, 3 min

Directed by Christiana Wheeler, Thomas Wingerd

Featuring Christiana Wheeler

A dance film about the ebb and flow of wind and the movement inspired by it.

Projections, 2021, United States, 4 min

Directed by Bruce Tetsuya

Featuring Han Andrew, Abbey Eheart, Bruce Tetsuya

A dancer enters the caverns of her own mind, to find and bury someone from her past.

Festival Premiere Installation

Frame from High Winds & Slippery Surfaces

High Winds & Slippery Surfaces, 2021, United Kingdom, 1 min

Directed by Pernille Spence, Corinne Jola, Zoë Irvine

Choreography by Corinne Jola

In High Winds & Slippery Surfaces a fleeting body fights to maintain control of their movement as they find themselves in an unstable and unpredictable environment. The film experiments with the friction between physical action, sound and space to awaken the kinaesthetic sense of the viewer. Repeated disruption in the flow of action and sound together with the abrupt changes between involuntary and choreographed movements creates a dark, unsettling viewing experience as the sonically immersive environment takes the viewer beyond the screen supporting a greater sense of awareness of the space surrounding them. High Winds & Slippery Surfaces was a 'One Minute' commission by GOAT media and Screen.dance.

Deluge, 2022, Estonia, 2 min

Directed by Kadri Hansen

Featuring Kadri Hansen

The aftermath of being unexpectedly drowned.

DayDreaming, 2021, United States, 11 min

Directed by Rourou Ye

Featuring Rourou Ye

A lonely dancer finds herself trapped, facing a door. With no escape, she is confronted by multiple beings caught in an unexpected battle. Deeply personal and playful, Daydreaming speaks to the isolation and anxiety of our contemporary times, and the power of our imaginations to shed light where there is darkness.

Walls Running, 2022, United States, 2 min

Directed by Charlotte Griffin

Dancing by Jonathan Banh, Madelyn Downs, Nicole Potts, Moises Felix, Gianna Hardison, Kayleigh Hulse, Kairah Jibri, and Katherine Munder

Music by Aaron Chavez, Natalia Yates

Motion Graphics and Visual Effects by Jaime Cano

Visual Art by Michelle Oosterbaan

"Walls Running" is an experimental screendance and part of a series of short "Impromptus" commissioned by Debra Noble, Director of Dance Repertory at California State University, Fullerton. Director Charlotte Griffin collaborated with visual effects designer Jaime Cano and artist Michelle Oosterbaan to immerse the dancers within layered abstract worlds with original music by composer/percussionist Aaron Chavez and harpist Natalia Yates. During the height of the COVID pandemic stay at home orders, the dancers used do-it-yourself green screen kits to capture their solo performances in isolation. Their dancing was collaged into shared 2D and 2.5D digital space playing with the push and pull of dimensional elasticity, kinetic exchange, and organic textures. Highly crafted, yet spontaneously felt, this series of impromptus brought many artists together during a time of prolonged separation.

5 Stages of Drowning, 2021, United States, 8 min

Directed by Ed Talavera, Konstantia Kontaxis, Dennis Scholl, Rosie Herrera

Produced by Konstantia Kontaxis, Ed Talavera

"5 Stages of Drowning" is a virtual reality experience that explores climate change and the climate gap in Miami through dance. Designed and choreographed on location in Little Haiti, East Little Havana/ Miami River and Virginia Key, "5 Stages of Drowning" juxtaposes movement, performance, and climate change in a cohesive narrative that prompts audiences to question their relationship with the environment.

Festival Premiere Screening

Amser / Time, 2022, United Kingdom, 6 min

Directed by Deborah Light

Produced by Laura Drane

Choreography by Light Ladd Emberton

Featuring Light Ladd Emberton

Moving through time along Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay, we arrive at today's climate crisis. Sarn Gynfelyn is revealed every low tide and looks like a road into the sea. In fact, it is a glacial moraine laid down 20,000 years ago when ice sheets melted, and it marks the beginning of the global conditions that have enabled human expansion. At Borth, a 6,000 year old forest flourished for a few thousand years. Submerged by the sea, it has since been re-exposed in recent storms. Sarn Gynfelyn and Borth’s forest are both cited as supporting the Cantre'r Gwaelod legend of lost fertile lands in Cardigan Bay, but the geology tells a different story. Moving forwards, we arrive at Fairbourne, a seaside town built on saltmarsh and English industrial wealth. It is now set to become the first UK town to be decommissioned due to sea level rise. It will be demolished and returned to salt marsh and will have existed for less than 200 years. In the intertidal zone, between land and sea, three people move, with arresting visual imagery through these three remarkable sites.

View the trailer.

Scapelands, 2020, United Kingdom, 4 min

Produced and Directed by Katie Beard, Naomi Turner

Choreography by Liv Lockwood

Scapelands explores our primal connections with nature and the effect of urban living on the human mind. Due to the current global pandemic, the psychological impact of our physical environments is being felt more significantly than ever before. Scapelands depicts this feeling of being boxed in and the inherent need to reconnect with something beyond our man-made walls. Scapelands was commissioned by BBC Arts and Arts Council England as part of the New Creatives Scheme.

View the trailer.

La Fuga dei Cervelli, 2022, France, 5 min

Directed by Mathieu Mondoulet, Thibaut Eiferman

Produced by Thibaut Eiferman

Choreography by Thibaut Eiferman

Featuring Company Entity

Dancing by Thibaut Eiferman, Chiara Corbetta

We all walk according to who we are socially. The body is a receptacle for everything we have experienced. Our identities are boxes filled with ideas imposed upon us according to the norms of the world we live in. Since childhood, we are trained in a way that dictates who we will be and perhaps takes away the awareness of choosing or the freedom to choose ourselves. Do we have the capacity to reinvent ourselves? What tools can we put in place to return to a state of awareness of who we are without external influence? Who would we be if we could see into our learned habits? "Brain drain" is an expression that designates a gradual exhaustion or flight of youth by emigration to a more favorable place according to its qualities. This expression, often used in a political or economic context (it would be, for example, often used to speak about the Italian youth who leave their country for fear of not finding a job in a situation favorable to the desires of their generation), in this video finds another meaning. Here, this flight will be deployed by those who wish to find a meaning to their life, towards nature and towards their nature. "Favorable" becomes the opposite of what it was. Instead of a flight to pursue over-individualization, the "favorable" place is one of collective effort to return to the essence of things.

Promise, 2022, United States, 5 min

Directed by Lane Michael Stanley

Produced by Lowell Blank, Sarah Jack, Lane Michael Stanley

Choreography by Sarah Jack

Dancing by Erica EG Gionfriddo, Thomas Sommo

An experimental dance film about grief, substance abuse, and recovery.

Ghostly Labor: A Dance Film, 2022, United States, 13 min

Directed by John Jota Leaños, Vanessa Sanchez

Produced by Harry Gregory

Featuring Vanessa Sanchez & La Mezcla

“Ghostly Labor: A Dance Film” explores the history of labor in the US–Mexico borderlands through Tap Dance, Mexican Zapateado, Son Jarocho, Afro Caribbean movement, and live music. This work brings together polyrhythmic movement and an original score to look at the (ongoing) years of systemic exploitation of labor while highlighting the power and joy of collective resistance. Based on farmworker interviews in California, this excerpt honors the sacred hands that feed us and was filmed on a farm with support from Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS), a non-profit advocacy organization for farmworkers in Half Moon Bay, CA. A full-length dance theater production of Ghostly Labor will premiere in 2023.

Inexistent Word, 2021, Russian Federation, 7 min

Produced and Directed by Vera Kachinskaya

Choreography and dancing by Vera Kachinskaya

A lonely naked man is fast asleep, surrounded by the sounds of his dreams. The protagonist wakes up in an unfamiliar area, there is no one around. The Voice appeals to him, it's a mother's voice, which accompanies him and brings him to conversation. When the man is ready to answer, the Voice breaks off. The dance sets in.

View the trailer.

She, 2021, Sweden, 8 min

Directed by Emil Dam Seidel

Produced by Emil Dam Seidel, Dorotea Saykaly

Choreography by Dorotea Saykaly

Caught in a room, the protagonist, Clarice, unfolds a vision of her own identity through a mirror interrogator. "SHE" is a cinematic adaptation of a solo dance performance with the same name. The original performance work was created and performed by Dorotea Saykaly and premiered at 5éme Salle at Place des Arts in Montréal, Quebec in 2019. Inspired by The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, the solo revolved around identity and doubt. Manifested through movement, distortion and an interview with a phantom interrogator, the original work proposed looking at a questioning body through a female lens. The cinematic adaptation of the original performance work arose during the first COVID lockdown in 2020 as a collaboration between Dorotea Saykaly and film director Emil Dam Seidel.

A Body Is, 2021, Spain, 4 min

Produced and Directed by Jaime Dezcallar

Choreography by Marco Flores

Featuring Cia Marco Flores

Antonio José Martínez Palacios was going to be the biggest Spanish musician of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, he was incarcerated and executed without a trial at the age of 33, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Frame from A Perpetual State of What the F#@k!!??

A Perpetual State of What the F#@k!!??, 2021, Australia, 9 min

Directed by Mick Angus, Gavin Webber

Produced by Mick Angus, Gavin Webber, Grayson Millwood, Kate Harman

Featuring The Farm , Dance Theatre Company

Seen through the eyes of a child, this is a film made like a dream, but a dream we are all in. It’s a dream of our future, blurred and indistinct, seen through a glass windshield, windswept by sand, hidden beneath the waves. Two children scavenge the carcass of a world decimated by negligence and come across the leftovers of the past, buried in the sand but still moving towards an end that’s out of sight. Award winning companies Jerrycan Films and The Farm (dance theatre) bring a uniquely physical and visceral aesthetic to the screen in a work of sweeping imagery that asks all of us to remember what keeps us together when it all falls apart.

The Wilyabrup Project, 2021, Australia, 6 min

Directed by Brenna Day, Steven Aliyan

Produced by Brenna Day

Featuring Brenna Day and Bonnie Blewitt

Above the waves, beneath the sky, against the rock. Moving against a staggering vertical cliff face, suspended above wild crashing ocean, two artists dance with the roaring wind and each-other in a celebration of human connection, our experience of nature and the vast wilderness that is the Wilyabrup sea cliffs. A choreographed performance of two bodies in gravity-defying motion tethered to the rockface, this vertical dance frames the artform against truly wild nature that shows the beauty, fragility and resilience of the human body and the environment. Filmed on Wadandi land in the south west of Western Australia.