For this year’s edition, dança em foco – Festival Internacional de Vídeo Dança is launching two grant programs for videodance creation/production. The initiative was made possible because of the new sponsorship of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company.
“Historically, dança em foco always supported diffusion and training. Even in our partnerships, we were always concerned with screening videodance and contextualize it through workshops, debates with local artists etc. Since 2002 we had the idea of a grant program, but we still couldn’t make it happen. In 2007 we had a program that awarded videos created for cell phones. This year we managed to make both happen!”, Paulo Caldas, one of the curators, celebrates.
The festival will award in the Vídeo1′ program videodances recorder with cell-phone cameras. The videos must be sent until April 23 and they must last up to one minute. Each creator will be allowed to submit one project and it must have been made from January 2009 on. Those selected will receive an award of R$ 1.000 and will be screened at dança em foco 2010.
In the Vídeo5′ program, screenplays for a videodance production of up to 5 minutes will be selected. The projects must be sent until April 30. Those selected will receive from R$ 3.000 to R$ 6.000, according to the project’s budgets.
Both programs seek to award projects that integrate dance and video as an autonomous composition. Besides the two, Rumos Itaú is another program aimed exclusively at the research and production of videodance. It recently screened the result of its last edition. Given the growing interest in the videodance language, many questions arise about what fits into this form of expression.
For Caldas, this debate will go on for a while. “Any difficulty in thinking about videodance is an unfoldment of the issues that emerge with contemporary dance. They are potentiated in the videodance context. All the tension of experimentation in dance also appears in videodance. In the curatorship process, I try to look for movement principles in that piece. It could be the body, editing or camera. This makes a connection between cinema and dance.”
The regulation is available at the festival’s website. More information may be obtained at edital@dancaemfoco.com.br.
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