HOMEPAGE : THEMES

The theme sections revolve around "loans" of image and movement: loans from other cultures, from far away, from the past, from other arts. Loans, or however else one may be inclined to call this activity, enrich moving images, and enable relations, encounters, and free movement to flourish. · The Belgian dance scene borrows from the theatre, the cinema, video-art, and lends itself in turn to directors, allowing them to use performance material for making films which might be considered as the absolute representation of the present. The boom in the Belgian scene twenty years ago, which fortunately still goes strong, is accompanied by an experimental film and video art scene of a similarly high quality. Films based on choreographies by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Alain Platel, Jan Fabre, Wim Vandekeybus, Christine De Smedt, and American Meg Stuart, who has been living and working in Belgium for many years now, as well as the first of the prize-winning Scrub Solos by director Antonin De Bemels, will be shown along with a series of older landmark films in the development of image in this scene, such as Topic I & II by Pascal Baes, revealing the secret of Belgian artists: unexpected cooperation. With the exception of Vandekeybus and De Keersmaeker (a small tribute to her work was made in VideoDance2000), most artists are presented in Greece for the first time. · In Body / Image: a fragmentary reality, the relationship between the body and the invasion of images is explored. In the context of both of these sections, Maarten Vanden Abeele's film Meg Stuart's Alibi will be shown. Based on the performance Alibi by Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods, the director of the film will be attending its world premiere in the opening of the festival. Two tributes · one to the echoes of German Expressionist dance and cinema in contemporary artists · and another to the dance in Egyptian musical comedy films of the fifties - are based on archive material from the French Cinematheque de la Danse, one of the largest dance film archives in the world, continuing our cooperation which started last year. Great artists such as Pina Bausch and Mats Ek or younger ones such as Sasha Waltz or Britt Randle, the creator of EVE, borrow elements from the expressive wealth of German Expressionism. The same as many modernist and contemporary artists, German Expressionist dance has borrowed in its turn from remote cultures, from the cultures of "others." Section Echoes from Elsewhere examines these cross-cultural loans. · Body Stories, familiar from previous VideoDance events, concerned with the new narratability of the body, Swiss Gilles Jobin's last work, The Moebius Strip, is presented among others. The film in both choreographic and filmic terms takes spectators into the inner, unexplored land of the body. Also shown is the somewhat older award winning, mythic Lodella by Philippe Baylaucq, a little masterpiece. · The director as choreograph - the choreograph as director · Dancing Vision · Mixer: Dance, Camera, New Media, are the other program sections each year, bringing the latest developments around the world in the use of visual media and new media in experimenting with movement and the moving image. · Satyricon is a little treat to our spectators. The films featured in this section satirize cliches in film and television genres.