Moves08 Festival of Movement on Screen

Specialist festivals of screen based dance and movement are hard to come by, and can often struggle to attract non-specialist audiences. Moves, however, has managed to carve out a distinctive niche for itself within the circuit in a relatively short time frame by straddling a matrix of convergence points. Inclusive billing as a festival of movement on screen has allowed director Pascale Moyes to combine content from an eclectic field of moving image sub-genres, including short film, animation, screendance and digital arts practice. Now in its fourth year, and its second as stand-alone event, the festival has proliferated rapidly, enlarging its geographical spread beyond its Manchester base to encompass locations throughout the North West, and expanding its range of screening options beyond the traditional, indoor, sit-down models to include podcasts; installations and a public screen touring programme.

The festival also has a strong ‘hands-on’ component, this year hosting a week-long filmmaking lab and new media workshop, with a three day conference dovetailing with the festival theme of the interaction of sound and image. Links were also formalised with the Clermont -Ferrand Short Film Festival, presenting a programme of work including Laurent Achard’s award-winning Fear, Little Hunter (2004). Here, a distanced camera position, fixed throughout on an exterior view of a house and adjoining garden, presents a minimum of visual information, concerning the movements of a young boy, a dog, and a woman we assume to be his mother, while ambient sound is manipulated to represent the characters’ emotional experience, building and breaking with disquieting force. In addition, the work of contemporary British-based artists was strongly represented, with the focus of a discussion forum, curated by South East Dance, shifting between Rachel Davies’ large-scale interweaving of image, music and personal testimony in The Assembly (2007); Simon Ellis’ experimentation with a two-second time-frame in work created for iPod viewing, and Andy Wood’s improvisatory-based camera practice. Elsewhere, Claudia Kappenberg’s graphically striking Moebius installation was projected as a triptych, viewable from a Manchester street corner, and former DJ Alex Reuben remixed a compilation from his often music-inspired back catalogue, with shorter works, including the elegantly minimal Que Pasa (2001), interspersed with excerpts from his road movie Routes (2007).

Moves08 succeeded in pulling off a tricky combination, providing a programme of screenings and events relevant to a range of special interest groups, while offering across the board access to an imaginatively forward-looking platform of cross-genre work.



Moves08 Festival of Movement on Screen
22nd - 26th April
RNCM, Manchester; Duke’s, Lancaster and big screen touring programme throughout the north of England


Chirstinn Whyte recently completed a PhD at Middlesex University, researching choreographic practice for screen. http://www.shiftwork.org.uk