Film Categories: dance

  • The Grand Design

    Filmed in scrumptious outdated super 8, The Grand Design is a glimpse into the reflections of a dying burlesque performer. Vintage black and white clips from stag films of the 1950s are juxtaposed against a muted Tuscan landscape, the home and final resting place of the unnamed woman. The Grand Design is an unapologetic look back at an unconventional life, lived to its fullest, in an almost forgotten moment of pop culture.

  • House Dress #1-5

    Five short dance works by a senior dance artist. An exploration of the body in mid-life and confined spaces.

  • Aturquesada

    Aturquesada is a performance-based project playing with the colour tealquoise, a word coined by the artist to describe a greenish colour that exists in between turquoise and teal. This performance takes place in a snowy landscape that is typical during Canadian winters. The violence inflicted upon the main character and her demise is absurd and humorous. This performative project is inspired by the artist’s connection to the winter Canadian landscape as an immigrant, as well as the emotionally violent nature of a brutal cold winter. This symbolic death by tealquoise is also part of a larger body of work that…

  • Festival of Light

    A record of illumination on the darkest night of the year, during an annual celebration held in Kensington Market, Toronto.

  • Methylenedioxymethamphetamine

    Using macro cinematography, “Methylenedioxymethamphetamine” documents the landscape of the drug MDMA. The combination of reflective abstractions with techno music creates an eerie meditation on rave culture.

  • Pivot

    Several years ago I came across a book by body language expert Joe Navarro where he describes physical gestures and how to determine whether someone is experiencing high stress or low stress with the ultimate aim of decoding whether someone is lying or telling the truth. Pivot is a recording of these enacted gestures after a computer algorithm has randomized them. The algorithm is based on an audio recording of morning birds where the randomness of the birds chirping was used to determine the randomness of the placement of gestures in the script. The performance was recorded inside the legal…

  • Cum Pane

    It’s physically demanding and sweaty. Grandma’s hands are gnarled from years of pain and hard work. Hands knead the dough. She works with rolling-pins, brushes and older baking utensils. She deftly places the bread on a peel and sets it in the stone oven. Grandpa takes care of the wood-burning , watches over it, blows life into it, again and again. He moves the bread around on the hot hearth. They work noiselessly. Close to each other. Crackling and pounding, scratching and clouds of flour. It is hot. The fire blazes. The smell of wood. The aroma of freshly baked…

  • Last Vestiges

    Aging stripper Eddy isn’t the superstar he once was. The patrons are bored with him, his lap dance regulars are blowing him off, and he’s coping with it all by self-medicating with drugs and booze. During a night of harsh rejections, Eddy notices an elderly man staring at him from across the club. Desperate for attention and money, Eddy offers the man a dance. But once the two are alone in a private booth, things take an unexpected turn.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • Lily Eng’s First Thursday

    Lily Eng was a progenitor of the first wave of Toronto performance art and experimental dance in the early 1970s. she was mostly Female Warrior rather than Tutu’d Princess—using deeply exploratory movement techniques, plus hardcore performance art concepts. Eng was cutting edge, defying ethnic and anti-feminist prejudices. Surfing on a wave of acclaim, she was one of few from the scene to establish an intercontinental reputation. The film’s title comes from Lily Eng’s First Thursday performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, in 2016. She was there by invitation, but it was 39 years since the 1977 Documenta 6…