Award-winning dance films return to Wexner Center festival

Alex Andrews
Tue, 06 Feb 2018 03:15:45 +0000
Arts & Life, Events, Movies, News, @30FPS, Josh Anderson, lucky seven all star show, mitchell rose, Ohio State Department of Dance, the best of dance @30FPS, the wex, wexner center, wexner center for the arts

“Ensemble” from the film “Home Alone,” which will be featured at The Best of Dance @30FPS. Credit: Courtesy of Zohar Ralt

Dance and film aficionados will get to experience nine of the best dance short films at this year’s The Best of Dance @30FPS on Thursday. ?

Hosted by the Wexner Center for the Arts, the annual international dance film festival will feature films curated by Mitchell Rose, an associate professor in the Department of Dance who has put on the event for six years.

Typically, Rose compiles a list of 15 to 20 of his favorite films from festivals he’s attended, and narrows it down to about seven for Dance @30FPS.

This being the seventh year, however, Rose chose to put together the “Lucky Seven All Star Show,” which will consist of nine films that have won judges’ and audience awards at previous film festivals Rose has conducted at Ohio State.

“Mariko” from the film “Home Alone,” which will be featured at The Best of Dance @30FPS. Credit: Courtesy of Zohar Ralt

“For a lot of the people in the department, [the films] will have played before they ever got here so it’ll be brand new to them,” Rose said.

One of the films is set in Barcelona and centers on two parking-garage attendants — a woman who works the day shift and a man who works the night shift. Rose said they only see each other in passing, until the day-shift attendant watches the cameras from the night before and witnesses the night-shift man dancing through the parking garage.

Eventually the two start communicating through their dancing on the cameras, before finally meeting up to perform a duet.

“I love it a lot. It actually has the least amount of dance in it,” Rose said. “It’s a very solidly made, beautiful narrative.”

Josh Anderson, a master of fine arts student at Ohio State, has attended previous film festivals curated by Rose and is currently working on his own dance film.

“[Dance film] means a couple of things. Creating a piece for film makes you have to think about not only the dancers that you have, who are moving bodies within the environment, but you also now have this third participant of the camera,” Anderson said. “I think that dance film can be a lot of things, but I think that it is using filmic ideals while attending to movement as a main guide for whatever is going on.”

The Best of Dance @30FPS will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Theater. Admission is free.