Liberation in Movement

It’s no coincidence that we call political movements as such: humans bodies moving do a lot more than dance—though dance, we certainly do! In all forms and styles, settings and spaces, we move ourselves and we move each other; we move alone and we move together. This collection of films provides a select glimpse of movement: choreographed and improvised, from ballet to contemporary to folkloric dance, with roots harkening back many centuries, though depicted now in decidedly current settings.

There are some thematic throughlines: centering ancestry, family, lineage, and community, through relationship and human connection, these films each ask, in their own way, how does movement give us a sense of belonging, of roots, of healing, of home? From women’s liberation to queer liberation, decolonization to political resistance, these films explore dance as an indelibly embodied form of culture that in its very expression declares a certain kind of inherent dignity and sovereignty of the human being and of the human body. If all art making and culture creation are crucial forms of resistance against oppression and war, erasure and destruction, the corporeal vulnerability of dance practices are unique in their protestation, in their vivid and visceral aliveness. The ineffable elements of dance are distinctive even among the performing arts, an ephemeral form of freedom in the flesh.

In these films, from Everything you have is yours to Fragments of Resilience, we watch various performers—at different ages and stages of life—transform into sculptors, moulding their own bodies into the shapes and expressions of their heart’s deepest desires, longings for connection and healing, meaning making. Dance is an opportunity to expose: to share otherwise inner worlds, and not, as in other art forms, in a way in which the artist may be hidden or less visible, but, in this case, through the body itself. “I want to get to that place where I have no strength to hide anything,” dancer and choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith declares in Elvira Lind’s film Bobbi Jene, “something had to come out of me.” How can movement return oneself to oneself? What can it help us to absorb, expel, heal, reconcile? What does it mean to belong deeply to the self as to others: to communities, families, cultures, nations, to the earth itself? How do our bodies hold and express such things? And in so doing, seek and find even just a flash of freedom?

On a collective level, how can witnessing one another move our human experience? “A sense of how spirit moves through us—to be alive! That’s enough,” exclaims dancer Evelyn Hart in Jamie Ross’ Dad Can Dance. There can be something transformative, even transcendent, about beholding another human body, another human being. The fleeting nature of live performance entails a radical presence where we merge: in the performer’s courage to be themselves publicly, to share themselves expressively, and to expose fearlessly, whatever that self is in that moment, the audience is gifted a slice of freedom, too. As a performance maker and a cinephile, a writer and a programmer, it is my sincerest hope and my deepest desire that these films connect with something somatic inside of you, too, and perhaps even draw out a sliver of a sense of the liberation in movement that these subjects and artists reach out towards in their work and in their lives.