Filmmaker Patrycja Kamska delves into dancers’ worlds in new VIDF web series

The artist captures the behind-the-scenes of the Vancouver International Dance Festival

POST SPONSORED BY vancouver international dance festival

Racheal Prince and Brandon Lee Alley in Hourglass by Ne Sans Opera and Dance. Photo by Patrycja Kamska

For its unorthodox 2021 edition, the Vancouver International Dance Festival has teamed up with filmmaker Patrycja Kamska on a web series that features the creative process behind each of this year’s artists. With the first episode released today, Kamska shares insights into her practice, the art that inspires her, and what excites her about directing this project. 

 

You’ve described your film practice as involving “highly intimate depictions of altered states of being”. What do you mean by this?

I’m interested in investigating altered states of consciousness that cannot be described but felt. My work is an exploration of memory, time, re-birth, and desire, often combining elements of fiction and documentary. Performance has the unique ability to arouse a transcendental experience through the vulnerable honesty of physical expression and the journey within a role or dance piece.

 

You studied art history at Langara College – is there an era or movement that specifically inspires you?

The post-war era resonates with me because that moment in time speaks to an existential reckoning for humanity in the wake of devastation. Artists like Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys attempted to grapple with this trauma and contemplate a new way forward. The artistic expression of that time helped people to look into themselves from a spiritual standpoint and question everything they had known about religion and God and the self and a lot of the work was instinctual, subterranean, and unconscious, and ultimately universal. In dance there are similar expressions, expressing feeling through movement, the artist as performer has the opportunity to enter into an otherworldly state, through physical exertion, repetition, or ritual.

 

What drew you from art history to film?

I believe that art history is a vital foundation for filmmaking, which is my passion. Knowledge of what came before is essential to create new work that reflects on important themes and movements in history, culture, and cinema. Art history has been able to trace the line of culture in its representations of that world.

 

Where does your interest “in exploring the crossover in film and dance” stem from?

Wim Wenders’s tribute to Pina Bausch has been a huge inspiration for me, in particular watching Café Müller, with its blend of the abstracted and expressive qualities of dance and the reality-based familiarity of theater. Together, film and dance engage as a new performative language and I would like to explore this space. Additionally, Jeremy Shaw’s Liminals has provoked me to explore trance, performance, and dance as mechanisms to speak about the human condition.

 

What excites you about directing the VIDF web series?

I feel very honoured to have the opportunity to support VIDF — a festival I have always loved attending. I hope to capture and share dancers' relationships to each other as people and as bodies, their relationships with their surroundings, and the complex space where the conscious and unconscious worlds lose their distinction.

 

Does anything challenge you with regard to directing the VIDF web series?

Covid-19 has been an obstacle; however, it has also been an opportunity to explore themes of healing and transformation in dance, finding new ways of engaging with the work and speaking through non-linguistic forms. The dance festival is a very communal endeavour, and it’s been inspiring to see how the dancers interact by building their own dance families.

 

This post was sponsored by Vancouver International Dance Festival.