NDEO OCt 2020
Panel "Empathy through the Screen: Implications for Creating, Curating, and Screening Dance Cinema" done with Michelle Bernier and Bailey Anderson for the National Dance Education Organization conference on Friday, October 23rd, 2020.
Michele is the Chair of the Board of Directors for Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, and Bailey is the Accommodations Coordinator at the University of Iowa.
Description: Can dance create empathy through the screen? Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema has been engaging with artists worldwide in this form for 16 years, collecting an archive of films that speak from a variety of perspectives, and emphasizing a commitment to inclusivity not only in terms of gender, race, country of origin, physical ability, and sexuality, but also form/structure, dance genres, budget, technical capacity, and production scale. Utilizing research on kinesthetic empathy and screen dance, three of SSF’s curators will discuss the various approaches that can be taken to embed empathy-creation in a dance film and how this impacts the viewing experience. We’ll screen a small handful of films from the SSF archive, pausing to discuss audience's empathic connections and the implications of curating for the festival, including attentiveness to representation of bodies and stereotypes.