Festival: Light Moves "screendance" Festival in Limerick, November 6th-9th

The Light Moves Festival, Ireland’s first festival of dance film, has announced its full programme. Taking place from November 6th to 9th in Limerick city centre, this will be the first festival of its kind in Ireland and is dedicated to the art of dance film and video art with movement as a central theme. The festival is a response to the vibrant and expanding field of dance film / screendance in Ireland. Combining classics, family screenings, invited works, open submissions, and explorations of screendance with some of the most respected figures in the field, Light Moves will feature a host of events. Events will take place in the amazing facilities of Dance Limerick, a resource for creatives and public alike, housed in historic architecture.

Festival highlights will include the comical ballet Playtime (1967), directed by Jacques Tati, telling of the misadventures of Monsieur Hulot in the maze of modernist Paris. The Light Moves screening will be the Irish premiere of the newly restored and released digital version of this classic film. Critic Roger Ebert declared, “Jacques Tati’s Playtime like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Blair Witch Project or Russian Ark, is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth.” A screening of Russian Ark (2002), Alexander Sokurov’s masterpiece filmed in a single shot at the Hermitage Museum, will be another festival highlight.

The programme will also include special family screenings of Disney’s Fantasia and Mad Hot Ballroom for young and old alike, taking place at No. 69 O’Connell St, and a series of free installations from a number of screendance artists running daily throughout Dance Limerick.

In total, Light Moves will screen over 50 hours of choreography and movement for camera, including 6 shorts screenings of curated works received through an international open call. This call received over 150 film submissions from over 30 countries across the globe, with the selection to be shown chosen by Festival Directors Mary Wycherley and Jürgen Simpson.

Another festival highlight will be the Light Moves Symposium running over two days entitled Rooting/ Rerouting Screendance with a keynote address from the seminal figure in screendance Douglas Rosenberg, founding editor of The International Journal of Screendance, whose works Here Now With Sally Gross and Circling will also be screened. The Light Moves Screendance Lab at the University of Limerick, entitled Screened Dance and The Danced Screen will be led by some of the most internationally respected dance film-makers – Douglas Rosenberg will be joined by the award-winning creative team behind GOAT media Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes, as well as the Festival co-curator Jürgen Simpson.

Light Moves is curated and directed by Mary Wycherley and Jürgen Simpson in collaboration with Dance Limerick and DMARC (Univ. of Limerick) with additional support from the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance (University of Limerick). It is a Limerick City of Culture legacy project and is produced by Dance Limerick.

Full programme details and tickets are now available on the Light Moves website, www.lightmoves.ie.