Dancehouse’s biennial festival of dance on screen returns from 13-31 from July with 37 screendance works screened at Dancehouse and digitally on demand. The festival also includes live and online talks, and four workshops for screendance makers.

The 2023 Dance (Lens) Festival is curated by three screendance artists and curators: Siobhan Murphy (Vic), Feras Shaheen (NSW) and international renowned guest curator Gitta Wigro (UK). The curators program the festival from a National callout, including the ‘Official Selection’ of recent local Australian screendance works.

The Dance (Lens) Official Selection program features a variety of dance on screen works including a home-grown spaghetti western, an exploration of cataclysm from expert Bharatnatyam performer Anandavalli, an interspecies collage of dancing human-worm chimeras, a surreal and whimsical animation about parklife during COVID lockdowns, and an extended music-video clip celebrating Jamaican dancehall.

18 Australian artists are featured in the Dance (Lens) Official Selection, including: Amber McCartney, Anna White, Azzam Mohamed, Claire Esterman,Claire Marshall, Cobie Orger, Erin O’Rourke, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Iqbal Barkat, Jude Walton, Karen Berger, Peter Fraser, Prue Lang, Rachel Owens, Rob Aspinall, Sarah Aiken, Teresa Blake, and Thuy Vy.

In addition to the Official Selection program, each of the Dance (Lens) 2023 curators have created a session of influential screendance works around a different curatorial theme. Feras Shaheen sees dance as a tool of unification in Out of Line. Water, paint, dust, fabric, sand, grass and debris are explored in Siobhan Murphy’s Material Moves, and international guest curator Gitta Wigro (UK) invites us to ‘observe what you hear’ in Sound Into Sight.

For makers attending the opening week of Dance (Lens), Cobie Orger and Siobhan Murphy offer four workshops to build skills and strategies to create screendance works. Dance and film artists are welcome and workshops are for all experience levels.