(Above: Still from the film “Home Suspended”)
Calcutta-based dance organisation, the Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, will showcase eight especially-curated short dance films at this year’s online JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience, which takes place online from August 24 to September 5, 2021.
The Pickle Factory make up the Indian Crossings Platform of the programme and come to JOMBA! thanks to support from the Durban Indian Consulate’s Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre. These films express an evocative interpretation of the festival’s theme ‘border crossings’, and speak to the zeitgeist of contemporary Indian dance making and its relationship to film and screen.
Their programme titled Ima / Material curated, especially for JOMBA! 2021 presents a series of dialogues between the mediums of dance and cinema created by artists from / in India. The dancers and filmmakers negotiate various material and embodied spaces through movement, opening up tensions and textures between natural and man-made environments, elements and expectations. The relationships between the dancing body, the camera and the surrounding contexts are diverse, fluid, and complex - reflective of a country, like India, where socio-cultural borders are never static, and traditional and contemporary sensibilities often occupy the same time/space.
The work has been co-curated for JOMBA! by Vikram Iyengar and Kunal Chakraborty. Iyengar is the Founder and Director of Pickle Factory Dance Foundation and is an arts leader and connector based in Calcutta, India and working internationally. He is a dancer-choreographer-director, curator-presenter, and arts researcher-writer. Chakraborty is a filmmaker who is closely associated with People’s Film Collective, a cultural and socio-political group in Calcutta in various capacities ranging from organizing international film festivals to screening films for children amongst other organisational activities. He is currently the Project Manager for Pickle Factory Dance Foundation.
Dance films include works and collaborations from Lubdhak Chatterjee, Dr Pompi Paul, Hediyeh Azma, Sumedha Bhattacharyya, Preethi Athreya, Sharan Devkar Shankar, Gia Singh Arora and Mukta Nagpal, Bimbavati Devi, Kankana Singh, Suman Sarkar, Souvik Banerjee, Thiyam Maurice, Niharika Senapati, Pippa Samaya, Nikita Maheshwary, Frédéric Lombard and Surjit Nongmeikapam.
Subscribe to the JOMBA! Youtube channel and watch The Pickle Factory films free and online on September 4 at 19h00 - visit https://www.youtube.com/Jomba_Dance
For more information and for the full programme go to: https://jomba.ukzn.ac.za/
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