Lightdancer

Life. Before and after your morning cup of coffee.

A Japanese fairy tale meets commedia dell'Arte. All in white, the naïf Pierrot lies in a wood. Doo-wop music plays as he rises, stares about, and reaches for the moon. Although music abounds and the children of the wood are there at play, Pierrot is melancholy and alone. Harlequin appears, brimming with confidence and energy. He conjures the lovely Colombina. Pierrot is dazzled. But can the course of true love run smooth?

During an interview, Tadashi, a young Spanish-Japanese actor who plays female characters in a theatrical practice similar to kabuki, will return to the past to relive his most intimate memories.

A child is born. We see underwater swimmers representing this. He is young, in a jungle setting, with two fanciful "instincts" guiding him as swooping bird-like acrobats initially menace, then delight. As an adolescent, he enters a desert, where a man spins a large cube of metal tubing. He leaves his instinct-guides behind, and enters a garden where two statues dance in a pond. As he watches their sensual acrobatics of love, he becomes a man. He is offered wealth (represented by a golden hat) by a devil figure. In a richly decorated room, a scruffy troupe of a dozen acrobats and a little girl reawaken the old man's youthful nature and love.

A spirit emerges from icy cold water to explore the beautiful snow covered garden she finds herself trapped within.

Boisterous nightclub entertainer Buzzy Bellew was the witness to a murder committed by gangster Ten Grand Jackson. One night, two of Jackson's thugs kill Buzzy and dump his body in the lake at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Buzzy comes back as a ghost and summons his bookworm twin, Edwin Dingle, to Prospect Park so that he can help the police nail Jackson.

At the Factory, laughter is produced, canned and shipped into the world in precisely measured, temperate doses. It lacks something, though: freedom and authenticity. One woman is unable to laugh according to the norms. She accidentally releases a reckless laughter breaking all the Factory rules. Soon realizes she is leading a revolution for freedom and joy, against pomposity.

A young Caribbean immigrant mother struggling to make ends meet at her dye factory job finds a release through her abandoned dream of dance.

Johnny Riggs, a con man on the lam, finds himself in a Latin-American country named Patria. There, he overhears a convent-bred rich girl praying to her guardian angel for help in managing her tangled business affairs. Riggs decides to materialize as the girl's "angel", gains her unquestioning confidence, and helps himself to the deluded girl's millions. Just as he and his partner are about to flee Patria with their booty, Riggs realizes he has fallen in love with the girl and returns the money, together with a note that is part confession and part love letter. But the larcenous duo's escape from Patria turns out to be more difficult than they could ever have imagined.

With the loss of Patroclus (his undeclared male lover), Greek warrior Achilles returns to the Trojan War.

Throughout a night out in downtown Tijuana, Laura waits for her destiny to arrive.

Five friends take a getaway trip and stay at Wonder Villa. But, the haunted villa's supernatural powers suck them in and their only chance to survive is by dancing.

Three completely different stories are told through dance.

Part of the larger filmic Four Journeys Into Mystic Time, in this work director Shirley Clarke makes use of a dancer’s body not only as the primary performer, but also as a canvas on which to paint projected images. Further enhanced by editing and effective use of shadows, the film is a transformative experience.

After their getaway goes wrong, two bank robbers (sisters Connie and Sly) set off a nearby car alarm. The siren pulls them into a trance-like state, making them perform a wild, hypnotic dance around the vehicle.

This athletically vibrant and sensual experience explores love across a lifetime. Using dance to inhabit a common mortal story of love born, lived, lost, burned, and seemingly gone forever, THROUGH YOU is a live-action VR richly infused with an atmosphere of passion. Dancers Joanna Kotze and Marni Thomas Wood, along with actor Amari Cheatom, take us through the coursing periods of time, from the 1970s to 2046 and beyond, where the question is harbored, “Can love be found again?

The fairytale story revolves around a young prince who - along with his entourage - is turned into a nutcracker through his own ungrateful and selfish behaviour, and awaits a kindly soul who'll release him from the spell. The mouse-king seeks the magic that made this happen so that he can become all-powerful. The prince (now a nutcracker) finds hope in the form of a girl who risks everything to help him become real again, while the mouse-king and his armies do everything they can to steal the magic for themselves.

In 1960, American dancer and actor Gene Kelly created for the Paris Opera Ballet an original choreography that was highly acclaimed at the time, yet rarely performed thereafter; a genius work that the Scottish Ballet, accompanied by the stirring and evocative score by composer and pianist George Gershwin, epitome of orchestral jazz, brings back to life sixty years later.

A feisty 18-year-old Italian-American New Yorker named Cindy is sent off to Rome with her irascible stepmother and vain stepsisters. On the way, she meets and falls in love with, globetrotting bagpacker Mizio, who eventually turns out to be of Italian nobility. There's a fairy stand-in in the form of a spaced-out astrologer, a dance, and she even loses a shoe at one point. Care to venture a guess how it all turns out?

Cinematic magician, legendary provocateur, and author of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger was a unique figure in post-war American culture. His iconic short films are characterised by a mystical-symbolic visual language and phantasmagorical-sensual opulence that underscores the medium’s transgressive potential. Anger’s work fundamentally shaped the aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s subcultures, the visual lexicon of pop and music videos and queer iconography. These nine films form the basis of Anger’s reputation as one of the most influential pioneers of avant-garde film and video art. Fireworks, 1947, 14 min Puce Moment, 1949, 6 min Rabbit's Moon, 1950/1971, 16 min Eaux d'Artifice, 1953, 13 min Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, 1954, 37 min Scorpio Rising, 1964, 28 min Kustom Kar Kommandos, 1965, 3 min Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969, 11 min Lucifer Rising, 1981, 27 min