Podcast: Still Voices Film Festival – Dance

We are thrilled to be once again partnering with Still Voices Film Festival to bring you a series of podcasts with artists featured at the international film festival located in the heart of Ireland. Still Voices Film Festival runs from November 9th – 13th 2022. Take a look at the programme here.

In this Dance-themed podcast, Niamh Creely talks to the creators behind 3 films that screen at this year’s festival.

Film Ireland Podcast · Still Voices Film Festival – Dance

In Velvet (Jessica Kennedy & Megan Kennedy)

A child sits alone on a beach. A man approaches and they set off on a journey, driving through the Irish landscape of green parks and stunted suburbs. A herd of deer graze nearby with their antlers peeling away: a shedding to transform into something new.There is an unsettled empty space that hangs between the child and the man. Will they continue on the road together or apart?

In Velvet is a short dance film created by the award winning company Junk Ensemble and commissioned by Irish Arts Centre | New York City.

amser/time (Deborah Light)

In the intertidal zone, between land and sea, three people move through three remarkable sites along Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay. We start 20,000 years ago and 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, 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 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.

On Mending (Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern & Emilie Louise Leriche)

A reflection on the beauty and inevitability of impermanence, On Mending is a short dance film that follows a community’s attempt to process overwhelming loss. The film and its characters wind their way through a vast and barren alpine landscape, an abstract land of memory and nostalgia. At its root On Mending is a contemplation on support, on community, on the action of releasing what we can no longer carry with us.

Meet the Artists

Megan and Jessica Kennedy

Junk Ensemble was founded in Dublin in 2004 by twin sisters Megan and Jessica Kennedy, and is committed to engaging diverse audiences through the creation and presentation of brave, imaginative and accessible work that sheds light on important human issues relevant to society today. Current Project Arts Centre Artists & Dance Artists-in-Residence at Firkin Crane and previous Artists-in-Residence at The Tate, Junk Ensemble is a multi-award winning company that has built a reputation as one of Ireland’s leading voices in dance. Junk Ensemble frequently collaborate with artists from other disciplines to produce a rich mix of visual and performance styles that challenge the traditional audience/performer relationship. This approach has led to productions being created in non-traditional or found spaces as well as more conventional theatre spaces. The company often work directly with communities in the creation and performance of their work. Their work has toured to New York, Europe, and throughout the U.K. and Ireland.

Deborah Light

Deborah Light is a dance artist, choreographer and movement director. So co-directs Light / Ladd / Emberton.

Light / Ladd / Emberton make bilingual dance productions move people, physically and emotionally. They are performed with and for audiences in castles, village halls, theatres, urban spaces, and on beaches, across Wales and beyond. We find untold and little-known stories from the history and cultural identity of Wales to connect the past with the present, link the local with the global, and combine the personal with the political.

https://www.lightladdemberton.com/
https://deborahlight.com/

https://www.facebook.com/lightladdemberton
https://www.facebook.com/deborah.ruth.light
https://twitter.com/lightladdember

Sound

http://www.sionorgon.co.uk/

Camera
https://culturecolony.com/

Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern

Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern is an American movement director and dancer who emphasizes humanity in his work. He believes strongly in the power of collaboration and is known for his visceral, masterful approach to partnering work and for pairing subtle theatricality with dynamic physicality. Following a seven year tenure creating and performing full time with New York City based Pilobolus Dance Theatre, he moved to Belgium where he spent four years as a lead performer for and choreographic assistant to Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Now based between Paris and Berlin, Shawn is currently engaged as a freelance performer, director and choreographer in diverse projects around the world.

Emilie Louise Leriche

Emilie Leriche is a freelance dancer and creator, based in Paris, France. From 2017-2021 she danced with GöteborgsOperans Danskompani under the artistic direction of Katrín Hall. During this time she originated roles in new works by: Yoann Bourgeois, Paul and Christine Blackman, Sharon Eyal, Club Guy and Roni, Roy Assaf, Marina Mascarell, and Damien Jalet.

Leriche began her career dancing with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago under the direction of Glenn Edgerton; after two years in their second company, she spent another four dancing in the main company prior to moving to Sweden. Over recent years, she has felt herself drawn towards creation, towards the tender place we go as artists when we decide to build and explore something new. She has created work on Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, and generated her own research alongside her colleagues at GöteborgsOperans Danskompani.