Superior house fire

Ella Cobb, Daily Camera, Boulder, Colo.

August 31, 2023 at 11:22 PM·6 min read

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Aug. 31—Twenty years ago, two friends had an idea for a no-frills, art-forward event that would highlight the largely underrepresented medium of dance cinema while sitting outside at the Sans Souci mobile home community in South Boulder.

The friends — Michelle Ellsworth and Brandi Mathis — had several friends in the world of dance film and wanted to host a low-key weekend of film screenings that were projected onto a white wall outside of Ellsworth's trailer.

Flash forward to 2023, and the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema has burgeoned into a full-on, internationally renowned film festival, attracting hundreds of guests and bringing in hundreds of film submissions each year from filmmakers, choreographers and dancers from around the world.

"Without sounding like I'm bragging, I have people tell me every year in their film submissions that their dream goal is to be selected by Sans Souci," said Michelle Bernier, the festival's executive director. "We have that international recognition and merit that comes with that 20-year reputation — and having been around since the early days of the form growing and expanding."

This weekend, Friday through Sunday, the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema will kick off with a special three-day celebration in honor of the festival's 20th birthday at the Museum of Boulder, 2205 Broadway, Boulder. The premiere event will feature a virtual reality dance film, video installations looping throughout the museum and will culminate with a 90-minute screening of selected films under the stars on the museum's rooftop.

Mary Wohl Haan — contemporary dancer extraordinaire and executive director of Boulder-based HAAN Dances — is the director of this year's live dance installations, which will take place throughout the weekend in the form of little "pop-up performances" within the museum.

Several dancers — including Haan — will perform throughout the museum on and around a 4-by-4-foot wooden platform.

"The concept behind my '4 x 4 Squared' project was to engage diverse dance artists to think differently about how they create and use space utilizing a raised small platform any way they wanted as a stage," Haan said. "The platform is also portable, so we can take them almost anywhere. We've performed in galleries, warehouses, in alleys and in my backyard."

The idea is to further immerse guests into the world of dance and movement, and will include dance styles ranging from contemporary to flamenco.

"We try to put dance inside of the museum in places that you wouldn't expect," Bernier said. "We won't be telling the audience when they're happening and where they're happening exactly — it'll just be something you stumble upon organically."

Boulder-born dancer and filmmaker Alexandra Lockhart — whose piece "Follow the Flow" will be featured in an installation at Sans Souci centered around local artists — is excited to share her environmental-based piece focused on the Colorado River crisis.

"It's very exciting just because Boulder is a very near and dear place to me, and being able to share this film in my hometown is very very special," Lockhart said. "Especially because there are so many people that are also passionate about the Colorado River, I definitely want to be able to share an art form and my expression of it."

Lockhart grew up in Boulder on Gross Reservoir, and said that she witnessed firsthand the effects of the Colorado water crisis as a child. As an adult, she studied contemporary and modern dance on the East Coast before eventually returning to Colorado during the pandemic.

Lockhart said that the Gross Reservoir dam expansion, which eventually caused her parents to move from her childhood home, led her to learn more about the water crisis and how it impacts Boulder and the entire western United States.

"'Follow the Flow' was a way for me to combine the two things that I love the most — dance and the wilderness," Lockhart said. "I wanted to create environmental dance films as a way to showcase really intimate relationships between humans and the natural world, and kind of utilize dance as a form of communication."

Lockhart's film follows her as she dances on a snowfield in Colorado, through a river in Utah and to the final stretch of the river in Yuma Valley in Arizona.

The 13-minute film ends in a barren landscape of a dry riverbed where the river used to flow through the Laguna Dam on the Colorado River.

"It was really important to me to film there because the Laguna Dam was the first dam built on the Colorado River in the 1930s, so it felt crucial to include that location," Lockhart said.

"Follow the Flow," along with five other films from local artists will be on display during this weekend's festival premiere before the main screening (6:45-7:30 p.m.), during intermission and after the screening.

Friday through Sunday, starting at 6:45 p.m., guests can get the full film festival treatment where there will be a chance to walk the red carpet, sip on wine and beer and snack on burrito bowls from T/aco while perusing the gallery before the main screening begins at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets start at $32 and can be purchased at sanssoucifestival.org.

Don't miss these films

Regret to Inform You: Directed by Yusuf Nasir, this stunning film, which was nominated for a Hollywood Critics Association Award, follows a Black performer (played by Nasir): "After one too many rejections, setbacks, micro and macro aggressions, he spirals into a riveting dance fantasy that allows him his full expression, while serving comfort and refuge from a world and society that holds no place for him."

Offering: A standout film directed by Marlene Millar that, in addition to featuring emerging genres of dance (including gigue, contemporary, street and circus), is crafted with body rhythms and a cappella singing. It was filmed in Montreal's urban borough of Little Burgundy to amplify its storyline of a reimagined homescape in the era of the pandemic.

Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema is celebrating its 20th...