Videodance Portraits with Professor McMains 

Two  dance films created by Professor Juliet McMains will be featured at the Local Sightings Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum, an annual celebration of Pacific Northwest cinema! 

• Saturday September 21, 2024 | 4pm 
  Kinetic Play/Juego Cinetico and External Links are  playing in the program Kinetic Energies, which features shorts that utilize dance and music to inspire viewers to rethink gender norms and the role of the body in public space. 
  Tickets are available for in-person or online screening. 

• Saturday Sep 21, 2024| 7pm 
  External Links is also playing in the  Eternal Ephemeral program which features films that blend poetry, autofiction, and landscape study.
  Tickets are available for in-person or online screening. 

These dance films are continued extensions of Professor McMain’s latest research  ub videodance portraiture. McMains created a series of video portraits, Faces of Contemporary Tango, that was screened last spring at Alder Hall Auditorium. Created during her sabbatical while living in Argentina, this series of video portraits of tango artists in Buenos Aires shows tango as a living tradition. 

The films featured in the Northwest Film Forum this September include one film created in Buenos Aires and one in Seattle . McMain’s film Kinetic Play/Juego Cinetico features dancers Milagros Rolandelli and Lisandro Eberle and music of contemporary Argentinian composer Diego Schissi. External Links features UW Dance staff Lisa Kwak and music by UW Dance Director of Music, Paul Matthew Moore. 

McMains explains of her creative process on the Faces of Tango website: 

“ The process for each portrait includes building a relationship with the subject(s), and then jointly deciding on a location, costuming, and music. On the filming day, I ask the dancers to improvise movement, and I film from multiple angles, improvising my camera actions in response to their movements, shadowing their dance with one of my own. I then spend many dozens of hours in the editing suite distilling the material into a portrait that becomes its own entity. My goal is that each portrait is an honest reflection of the dancers’ style, yet in a more heightened and condensed form than their live dancing, bringing their most essential qualities into tight focus. I am a one-person operation, which means that I wear all the cinema hats (e.g., director, location scout, lighting designer, cinematographer, editor, colorist, etc). The bare-bones nature of my filmmaking leads to limitations in production quality, but in exchange, it enables me to develop a more intimate exchange with the artists that I hope translates to more intimate portraits.”