FILMS BY Anton Califano, Jevan Chowdhury, Rachel Davies, Sara Gordon, Alessandra Seutin, Rosie Whitney-Fish.

 

 

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 several 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.

 

In 2012, Mobile Dance and East London Dance came together to deliver Postcards from East London, with teams of artists based in east London and four different community groups from the area.

 

Each community group worked with a different schedule - some meeting once a week for two months, others working intensively over three or four days. The teams each had only three hours to shoot the film.

 

The result is nine contrasting short films revealing different viewpoints on this vibrant, diverse and rapidly changing part of east London.

 

The project was funded by High Street 2012, a programme to enhance and celebrate the ribbon of London life that connects the City at Aldgate to the Olympic Park at Stratford in the year of the London Olympics. 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.

 

Postcards from Berlin