Contact Dance International Film Festival

[caption id="attachment_22951" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Contact Dance Every Body by Olya Glotka[/caption] Contact Dance Every Body by Olya Glotka danced away with the Gold Jury Award at the Contact Dance International Film Festival (CDIFF).  The film features StopGap Foundation founder Luke Anderson as he dances using his wheelchair to gracefully lift his dance partner Laura Storey as they intertwine tenderly in the galleries of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Olya Glotka is a young, self-made filmmaker who is in search of ways to empower people and make the world a better place through the power of filmmaking and dance. Parcon NYC #1: Subway Stops won the Silver Jury Award, filmed by Satoko Sugiyama, Martin Henson, and Parcon NYC. Capturing the story of an everyday subway ride home for a Latinx girl from the Bronx, the environment around her comes alive with dancers performing a genre that fuses parkour with contact dance improvisation called parcon. Martin Henson and Satoko Sugiyama are independent filmmakers with hundreds of films and television commercials to their name. Parcon NYC is a collective of artists, movers and healers dedicated to inclusion and investigating human connection with others and place through weight sharing, balance and touch. The Bronze Jury Award was awarded to Wake Me Up, a short film by Celine Poon. The film started as a school project at the International Baccalaureate school, Fairview International School in Kuala Lumpur after two young girls, Sonia and Leila, discovered contact dance improvisation. The result is a delightful and honest portrayal of friendship that is the epitome of contact dance improvisation all levels approach. The CDIFF finishes up its third season today with a post-festival film workshop with Gold Jury award-winning filmmaker Olya Glotka and guests making dance films in various locations in High Park.

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[caption id="attachment_22717" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Parcon by Andrew Suseno and ParconNYC[/caption] The Contact Dance International Film Festival (CDIFF), returns for its third season June 28 to July 2, 2017 in Toronto with five different screening programs presented alongside dance workshops, jams and parties where dancers fly and bodies collide with force, grace and tenderness. The Festival will bring Mayumu Minakawa and Tom Weksler to Toronto to teach Tom’s Movement Archery workshop, and to perform together and present their film work. Other special guests include filmmaker and dancer Harriet Waghorn, from Edifice Dance Theatre in the UK, who will be teaching her unique fusion of ballroom and contact improvisation; New York filmmaker and Parcon dancer Andrew Suseno who will teach an outdoor cityscape workshop; and Luke Anderson (Founder of the StopGap Foundation) and Laura Storey who, with Festival director Kathleen Rea, will teach Inclusive Contact Improvisation Workshops and facilitate an Inclusive Contact Improvisation Jam; and present their film Contact Dance Every Body by Olya Glotka. This year, the festival will present 80% of its programming is in accessible spaces. There are two films on the program that showcase dancers using a wheelchair; Contact Dance Every Body and the documentary Intimate Dance: Journeys through Movement by Sanford Lewis. The inclusive workshops and jams lead by an all-abilities team of dance teachers are designed to be welcoming to people of all training levels and abilities, to those new to the form of Contact Dance, and to dancers using wheelchairs. The Festival literally kicks off on Wednesday, June 28, at Dovercourt House with a pre-Jam Workshop Class with Tom Weksler, followed by The Wednesday Dance Jam with music by Jennifer Gillmor; and continuing with the first screening program, Toronto Spins, a mixed program of short films that celebrate the explosion of dance films made by Toronto based filmmakers and dancers. Also, included is a documentary on the Israeli Contact Festival. Each day of the Festival features workshops, classes and Jams with live music with the Festival’s visiting artists plus evening screenings and a live performance of Zen and the Art of Dance with Mayumu Minakawa and Tom Weksler at the Betty Oliphant Theatre on June 29; Rotating View Points, a mixed program of short films that find contact improvisation in an underground parking lot, on a circus pole and through philosophical discussion, at the Celia Franca Centre on June 30; An Intimate Dance: Journeys Through Movement and Touch, a feature-length documentary following the lives of an all-star athlete, a skeptical beginner, and a professionally trained dancer on and off the dance floor, at the Celia Franca Centre on July 1; plus the Gala Film Screening of international shorts showing dancers rolling up and down the Niagara escarpment, local water towers, an abandoned factory, a farmer’s field, the Helsinki Market Square, the New York subway, and Toronto’s financial district, at the Revue Cinema, also on July 1. Sunday, July 2 offers an intense post-Festival Dance Film Making workshop with Olya Glotka in various locations around the Roncesvalles/High Park area, from 3:30pm-Dusk. Films will be made! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqGH5i54Nh8

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