Screen dance festival returns to Dancehouse

26 June 2023

The 2023 Dance (Lens) Festival is curated by three screendance artists and curators: Siobhan Murphy (Vic), Feras Shaheen (NSW) and internationally-renowned guest curator Gitta Wigro (UK).

The curators program the festival from a national call-out, including the "Official Selection" of recent local Australian screendance works.

There will be seven screening sessions at Dancehouse - most about 40 minutes long.

The Dance (Lens) Official Selection program features a variety of dance-on-screen works including a home-grown spaghetti western, an exploration of cataclysm from expert Bharatnatyam performer Anandavalli, an interspecies collage of dancing human-worm chimeras, a surreal and whimsical animation about parklife during COVID lockdowns, and an extended music-video clip celebrating Jamaican dancehall.

Altogether, 18 Australian artists are featured in the Dance (Lens) Official Selection, comprising Amber McCartney, Anna White, Azzam Mohamed, Claire Esterman,Claire Marshall, Cobie Orger, Erin O'Rourke, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Iqbal Barkat, Jude Walton, Karen Berger, Peter Fraser, Prue Lang, Rachel Owens, Rob Aspinall, Sarah Aiken, Teresa Blake and Thuy Vy.

In addition to the Official Selection program, each of the Dance (Lens) curators has created a session of influential screendance works on a curatorial theme. Feras Shaheen has curated "Out of Line", which shows dance as a tool of unification. Water, paint, dust, fabric, sand, grass and debris are explored in Siobhan Murphy’s "Material Moves", and international guest curator Gitta Wigro invites us to "observe what you hear" in "Sound Into Sight".

Dance (Lens) Festival in 2023 is supported by the Besen Family foundation.

The festival also includes live and online talks, and four workshops for screendance makers.

For the full program, go here.