Festival Celebrates Work Between Dancers and Filmmakers

Screen capture from "Persecution" (2009) by John T. Williams

The French expression "sans souci" translates "without worries." For a few hundred years it has been used as a name for luxurious real estate, for example the baroque Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, Germany, or the 200-year-old Sans-Souci in Haiti.

It is also the name of the trailer park in Boulder, CO where in 2003 Michelle Ellsworth and Brandi Mathis dreamt up a festival of dance on film. They were uninterested in dance troupes simply taping their performances, rather they wanted video artists and choreographers to collaborate, designing dances that could only be fully realized on film. The result is dance that integrates digital editing and multiple angles to create movements impossible to recreate live.

What began as a low key local art project is now an internationally touring festival drawing submissions from all over the world.

This weekend AtticRep theatre company hosts the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema in its space at Trinity University. This year's festival features over twenty film-dance collaborations, with most of the work coming from California-based artists (none from Texas). There are no video samples on the festival's website, but the entries seem to cover a wide variety of dance styles, including ballet, modern dance and breakdance.

I'm especially anxious to see "She" by Kathy Rose, which seems to incorporate some kind of robotics in its execution and is described on the website as "an insectoid fantasy with an indio-arachnid soundtrack." Awesome.

Since 2005, AtticRep has been a source of contemporary theater in San Antonio, and their hosting of the Sans Souci Festival adds to that tradition. The festival begins tonight at 8 p.m. Tickets are available through the AtticRep website.