Texas Christian University dance professor, choreographer, and longtime Dance Magazine contributor Suki John transformed a work she first created in 1990 into the narrative dance film Sh’ma: A Story of Survival, for which she was recently awarded the 2025 Chita Rivera Award for Outstanding Choreography in a Feature Film. On the significance of Sh’ma, John […]

To continue our recent celebration of 25 to Watch Live, this week we’re featuring three dance films from artists featured in 2025’s “25 to Watch” in a mini Friday Film Break Festival. On BLUSH, directed and choreographed by Dava Huesca and danced by Charrie Burke, Huesca says: “As a Black woman I am consistently navigating a world […]

To continue our recent celebration of 25 to Watch Live, this week we’re featuring three dance films from artists featured in 2025’s “25 to Watch” in a mini Friday Film Break Festival. On his dance film Ballroom Dancing, choreographer Loughlan Prior explains: “I’d been creating a lot of large-scale narrative work for the stage, and so […]

To continue our recent celebration of 25 to Watch Live, this week we’re featuring three dance films from artists featured in 2025’s “25 to Watch” in a mini Friday Film Break Festival. On SEX MYTHS, danced by Susie Buisson and Pierre-Émile Lemieux-Venne, choreographer Brett Fukuda explains: “SEX MYTHS represents my commitment to challenging preconceptions about gender. It […]

The short film Then Comes the Body tells the inspiring and unlikely story of a ballet school outside of Lagos, Nigeria. Film director Jacob Krupnick first discovered Leap of Dance Academy as millions of others did—through a viral video of ballet students dancing in the rain during the first summer of the pandemic. The school […]

In the quiet chaos of backstage, a dancer meticulously laces her pointe shoes while another leans over in fatigue; nearby, a couple rehearses their choreography. These seemingly mundane moments often go unnoticed, yet for Belgian filmmaker Sam Asaert, they reveal a compelling contrast between the polished personas dancers present onstage and their more vulnerable selves […]

Closer Than Yesterday, directed by Lisa Le Lievre, follows San Francisco Ballet’s Carmela Mayo as she prepares for the 2022 Helsinki International Ballet Competition. The documentary shows Mayo, who had recently recovered from surgery, rehearsing competition variations with partner Esteban Cuadrado and coach Tiit Helimets. A series of twists and turns complicate the days leading […]

After years of staring at a screen editing films, Berlin-based filmmaker Boris Seewald felt compelled to work with a more tactile medium and turned to painting. He dug up unused footage from his previous dance films and employed an animation technique called rotoscoping (think A-ha’s “Take On Me” music video) to translate the footage into […]