Jo Parkes
Dance artist
Postcards from...
2009 - ongoing
Postcards from... is an international dance/film project in which teams of artists work with community groups to create short “moving postcards” of the area in which they live. The project was conceived and is artistically directed by Jo Parkes. Each project produces a series short dance films, each under one-minute long, which present the location through the eyes of the participants.
In each location, Jo works with an arts development agency to recruit local artists to create the films with several different groups in the area. Each community group works with a different team of artists. Each team is made up of choreographer, filmmaker, composer and assistant dance artist
Postcards from...has taken place in Berlin (2009), east London (2012), Bremerhaven (2016). In 2013, Jo Parkes and Sven O. Hill did a special edition of the project in Lina Morgenstern School. In 2017, Letters from Wuppertal, a extended version of the project was delivered in partnership with Tanzrauschen.
The Postcards from Berlin films were premiered in May 2009 at Arsenal Cinema on Potsdamer Platz and in the Berliner Fenster, the screens on the Berlin underground trains, where they were seen by over one-million people each day for two weeks. In 2009, the project was a prizewinner in the competition “Kinder zum Olymp”. Postcards from East London was part of Big Dance 2012 in the London 2012 festival, the culmination of the cultural Olympiad. The films have since been shown at (among many others) Cindedans, Amsterdam, Dance Screen at San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Angel Alley has won an award as a Pool Pearl at POOL Film Festival Berlin.
