Take a look at the Best Video Dance winners of the past years and know a little bit more about the artists.

2023

Best Video Dance

Let's call it a tie

Gathering for the late fancy evening celebration eleven members of one family are joyfully meeting each other around one table under the roof of parents` house. While the dinner is being served with every stage of festive family tradition they go through the sequence of memories, revealing the brokenness, ties glass fragility and swelling rift between them under the dominance of parents in charge and especially mother`s figure.

Starting point of film research became the personal experience of some project participants based on break appeared in many families in Russia after the beginning of war in Ukraine because of Russian propaganda influence.

Director Vasiliy Zhitlov and Maya Selezneva

Movement Director Maya Selezneva

2023

Best Short Video Dance

Resurrection under the Ocean

"Resurrection under the Ocean" is about the resurrection of a man who was helplessly sinking to the bottom of the ocean, after falling to the bottom of the ocean, with a symbolic narrative.

Director Serkan Aktaş

2023

Audience Choice

Unstable Bodies

UNSTABLE BODIES, short film explores the rigidity of buildings and the search for balance. Made in collaboration with male and female dancers from the FAICC course at Instável - Centro Coreográfica do Porto. The choreography dialogues with the designed space of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, an iconic building designed by architect Álvaro Siza Vieira.

Director Vinicius Ferreira

Producer Instável Centro Coreográfico

Producer Selva

2022

Best Video Dance

VOID

Winding upwards, gazing downwards, slinking, sinking, vaulting, halting, a solitary figure, dancer Erin O'Rourke journeys through an old labyrinthine staircase as a metaphor of her psyche. Moments of déjà vu and multiple selves emerge in a dance film that conjures ideas of psychological entrapment of women trans-historically.

EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH:
Taking an experimental approach, following Claire's 2019 film Shift (a duet that travelled through numerous locations), Claire became interested in exploring the performer/ location relationship without the distraction of meaning drawn from a duet asking, 'do we seek to read more story information from a solo dancer in a single location than in a duet?'

Furthermore, 'up nodding' to scholar Sylvie Vitaglione's assessment of locations in dance film, Void became an experiment in responding to a single interior location - the abandoned staircase.

Drawing from iconography associated with the location, Void was an investigation into how cinematic elements of the lens, editing, and the location itself can be furthered to realise the sense of story and subvert experiences in dance film. Through this process, the stairs became a signifier of a journey, the closed stairwell presented the idea of entrapment, and the repetition in the architecture provided the impetus for multiple selves. Finally, Void embraces the concept of the 'journey'; slowly building, slowly impacting to the climax.

Director Claire Marshall www.clairemarshall.com.au/