Hotel Armada is a curated portrait of dance and expression showcasing talents in the world of contemporary, vogue, and ballet. It is an integration of time, space, movement and sounds highlighting each performer's rawness in their power and beauty.
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A Portrait of Dance
5.5The Brazilian FunkStar, nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist, took the stage at the live show in Los Angeles and performed, during a 45-minute set, songs from her latest album "Versions of Me" (2022), and more.
1.0Seven minutes in length, the film features two black male hikers — one ascending a mountain, another descending — who encounter each other as their paths cross. Their balletic movements are at once lithe and halting, athletic and awkward, challenging stereotypical notions of the forever rhythmic elegance of the black body in space.
1.0An innocent tourist travels to LA and unexpectedly conjures her sister's last night alive. Bold score, stylized dance and an eccentric cast, shot at The Standard Hotel, weave a dark and luminous film that revamps traditional narrative.
10.0Return to 'burn' only to find out you're already in that urn.
10.0(Some of us) Still run down the same [mental&emotional] streets we revered/reproached/replaced as children.
10.0Locked away but not away; somewhere nearby but unreachable, a periphery so notfaroff it's always in sight.
Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)
7.0The remarkable spirit of tap dancers and their history provides a joyous backdrop for intimate portraits of hoofers Sandman Sims, Chuck Green, and Bunny Briggs.
6.5Boisterous 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.
0.0An auto-documentary about a disenfranchised Everyman and his struggle to re-integrate himself into society. He fails and turns to crime.
7.0A sampling of forty-nine fragments from Frampton's catalogue of 'actualities', the films from STRAITS OF MAGELLAN: "DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS" are all silent and unedited. Several invoke, directly, the work of the Lumieres, as in Frampton's reworking of DEMOLITION D'UN MUR (1895) in which a dilapidated farm silo is demolished in place of the Lumieres' wall. He makes reference to his own work and plays homage to the work of contemporaries. A complex range of formal issues are raised in other fragments. Finally, Frampton offers a number of analogues for the act of filming and cinematic seeing that includes a series of appropriated 'lenses' ( a stone portal, a wooden silo) and a set of 'screens' a pool of water, curtains, a dusty window).
6.2This intimate ethnographic study of Voudoun dances and rituals was shot by Maya Deren during her years in Haiti (1947-1951); she never edited the footage, so this “finished” version was made by Teiji Ito and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death.
5.9"Tourou et Bitti", an eight minute documentary concerning a ritual in Niger, is yet another example of Rouch's excellence in creating documentaries which surpass the conventional documentary format. Just as frightening and fascinating as "Les maîtres fous", this one goes straight into the roots of ancient African cultures, in which music has an hypnotic effect, being at the same time an exorcism and a public show. Both the female and the male dancers are almost deities about to be unleashed... Spectral and humanitarian.
0.0Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Ballets Russes, Sadler’s Wells commissioned four of today’s leading and acclaimed choreographers to create one work each honouring the legacy of impresario Sergei Diaghilev. IN THE SPIRIT OF DIAGHILEV features Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun, Russell Maliphant’s AfterLight (Part One), Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1909 and the controversial Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez by Javier de Frutos. Specially filmed interview content offer viewers the unique opportunity to take a look behind the scenes at the works in rehearsal, as the collaborators share their thoughts on the enduring influence of Diaghilev and the remarkable collaborative spirit of the Ballets Russes. The performances involve collaborations with artists and filmmakers Jane and Louise Wilson, acclaimed composer Nitin Sawhney and costumes by leading fashion designer Hussein Chalayan.
6.0An improvisation recorded over the course of one day, starting at dawn and finishing after dusk. The film was edited in camera and shot from one camera position in the middle of one of the 112 football pitches that cover Hackney Marsh, a location chosen because of the similarities between the surrounding buildings and objects (identical blocks of flats, goalposts etc.). By cutting between precisely matched framings of similar objects, illusions of movement were produced, disrupting representational readings of the landscape. Unforeseen events occurring in the vicinity were also recorded, determining to some extent the subsequent filming. Through selection of shots and changes in cutting pace and speed of camera movement, the film fluctuates between record and abstraction.
How do we bring our physical bodies with us into our inevitably digitally-bound futures? Collaboratively conceived by director Brian J. Johnson and Vancouver’s acclaimed Company 605, Future Futures is a collection of five short dance films that explore the digital destiny of humankind through a unique merging of camera and visual effects with a specific choreographic vision. Embracing the absurdity of centering dance inside a sci-fi narrative, the experimental series collapses time to portray human culture at an unprecedented moment: the emergence of a new, autonomous, and intelligent being—the digital reflection and culmination of ourselves. Through its otherworldly imagery, choreography, and driving electronic sound score, Future Futures evolves into a strange, highly visual exploration of what we are if we are no longer tied to our physical bodies, and how we will define humanity when faced with a fading IRL existence.
7.8A 12 year old boy with a passion for dance and his brother are rescued from the streets by an old showman who takes them to live with his estranged former dancing partner/brother.
0.0Motion Control examines the synergy of camera and performer. Shot on 35mm, it explores from the camera's pov, the physical and emotional entrapment of the ageing and glamorous dancer in her private and personal spaces. The film is notable for hypersound foley overlaid with text and electro-opera composed by Billy Cowie and sung by soprano Naomi Itami.