OPEN PROCESS DANCE FILMS BY DAHCI MA AND DANIEL CONRAD
Q & A with the Filmmaker Dahci Ma after the screening
Free Admission
5:30 - 7:00 PM, September 13, Saturday
Mag:net Cafe Katipunan
www.magnet.com. ph

The Films:

1. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
10min/Fiction- Dance,Fantasy/ HD/No Dialogue
April 2008 Korea

Film Synopsis: It’s torn into pieces and gone with the wind.
Director’s statement: To approach in a different way.

Director: Dahci Ma
Writer: Boram Park & Dahci Ma
Producer: Dahci Ma
Chereography: Jaeyoung Park
Music: Youngkyu Jang
DP: Youngsoo Bae
Editor: Sunmi Kim
Cast: Jaeyoung Park, Kitaek Ahn, Seongmin Ham, Chanok Jeong

2. ABOARD THE PATER NOSTER
Produced and directed by Daniel Conrad, choreographed by Aszure Barton

This dance film invents a little tribe of humans trying to make sense of their dehumanized lives, as they pass through the city of Prague. In the beginning, they ride on a "pater noster," a cyclical, continuous elevator in which multiple door-less cars are strung along the cables like beads on a rosary. Then they board a streetcar cycling in an endless loop through Prague. They react to the car's wild movement and the city's unpredictable natural light as the streetcar lurches through traffic. We are so submerged in cities that the shapes and cycles of our lives are invisible. This film offers new ways of looking, using variations on themes of circularity, the craving for human contact, and the sense of being simultaneously alone and together.

3. AFTERNOON OF THE CHIMERAS
Produced and directed by Daniel Conrad, choreographed by Aszure Barton

This 35mm film is built like a fugue in ten short movements. The images are deliberately lush, in the way that Brueghel and Bosch are lush. The theme, human transformation, is expressed by dancers in the roles of chimeras (mythological creatures made of parts of different animals, e.g., centaurs, minotaurs). It was shot in the extreme isolation of Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands), where the dancers and crew survival-camped for a month. Here, chimeras cavorted in the thick moss, volcanic rock, roots, tide pools, seaweed, and sheer cliffs. Transformation occurs easily and spontaneously between certain kinds of natural forms, as any Inuit sculptor can attest. Such ways of looking are highly developed in cultures such as the Inuit, the Dogon (Mali), or the Kwoma (New Guinea), who live in and with wilderness. If, walking through a forest in dense mist, we see a bear, and as we get closer we see it's really a tree stump in the shape of a bear, we say
we never saw a bear, only a stump. But someone from an animist culture might say we saw a bear which turned into a stump that now contains the spirit of the bear, as in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In this way of looking, perception is always valid.

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