London International Screendance Festival 2019

Description

review of the festival including 'Digital Afterlives' (Pearlman & Allen, 2018)

Subject

Attending a Screendance festival sometimes feels like watching MTV in the 90s: a steady succession of ever new clips in bite-sized format, waiting for your favourite to come on. Occasionally all the stars align and a lm achieves a perfect synthesis of editing, musicality, camera and human movement. Digital Afterlife by Richard James Allen and Karen Perlman (The Physical TV Company (http://physicaltv.com.au), Australia), sees Allen himself, dressed all in white with winged angel shoes, dance through a black innity with a bemused look on his face, like someone who just died and went to heaven – only to realise the afterlife isn’t at all what he expected. Or did anyone guess it would be angels in trainers exhaustedly jumping around to Franz Liszt? Brimming with digital effects such as multiplying, overlaying, zooming and shrinking, it is the virtuosic musicality of this choreography of tricks that stands out, and a sweet whimsical humour perhaps comparable to Disney’s masterpiece Fantasia.