The Los Angeles Times named the DCW festival ‘Best of LA’ for both 2006 and 2007. Partnering with some of our most prestigious venues in Los Angeles, the festival offers a global perspective of a new visual language. The programming consists of experimental shorts, documentaries, features, and symposiums with visiting international artists.

The June festival opens at the REDCAT Theater in downtown LA, with its legendary kick-off party on Friday, June 6, 2008. For one of the many highlights of the festival, DCW will present two days of programming at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theatre entitled “From B-boys to Ballerinas.” The weekend of free events will kick off with Marcy Garriott’s award-winning feature-length documentary Inside the Circle, about break-dancing B-boys from Texas, screening on Saturday night the 14th at 7:00pm with a lively DJ party immediately following. Then on Sunday the 15th two programs - an afternoon and an evening one – will captivate viewers on Father’s Day. The 2:00pm program features two wildly creative dance performances on film: Jiri Kylian’s Sleepless from Netherlands Dance Theatre and bODY_rEMIX, Marie Chouinard’s masterpiece from Montreal. For the 6:00pm program on Sunday, Dance Like Your Old Man from Chunky Move, a contemporary dance company from Australia will screen, followed by Here After, a film at the crossroads of fiction and dance by Belgium director and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez.

* Sat. June 14 at Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood

“From B-boys to Ballerinas” – the program at the Hammer this Father’s Day weekend 7:00pm with dance party to follow Inside the Circle – feature length film screening

B-boying was an integral part of early hip-hop in the 70’s as street corner DJs noticed that dancers were exploding with creative moves during the breakdown sections (or breaks) of funk songs. Quickly labeled “breakdancing” by the media, this grassroots art form was overhyped in the early 80’s, and then seemed to disappear from view. But rather than dying out, b-boying went underground and it went global, and it has now evolved into an extraordinary dance form with a remarkably interconnected worldwide culture. Inside the Circle, an award winning documentary by Marcy Garriott, provides a unique window into this world as itfollows the intense and intertwined stories of three Texas b-boys - Romeo Navarro (B-Boy City), Josh (MIND-180), and Omar (Mighty Zulu Kingz) - across several years. 102 minutes

- With special guest appearances by the filmmaker and featured dancers for a Q & A.
- With a DJ dance party to follow in the Hammer Courtyard.

* Sun. June 15 at Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood

“From B-boys to Ballerinas” (continues) – the program at the Hammer this Father’s Day weekend 2:00pm Contemporary Ballet (at its finest!) (2 films = 73 minutes)

Contemporary ballet choreographer Jiri Kylian created Sleepless in 2005 featuring six dancers from the Netherlands Dance Theatre (NDT). Sleepless presents a hallucinating blend of body parts that unexpectedly appear and disappear through a permeable back wall. NDT is superb, amusing and at times, leaves one gasping. Composer Dirk Haubrich uses the glass harmonica and the slow passages of Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo in C Minor to add a mysterious fragility.

If director Stanley Kubrick made ballets this is what it would look like! Choreographer Marie Chouinard from Montreal and her company of ten dancers execute variations on the exercise of freedom in this stage production from 2005 filmed in 2007. Often, the dancers appear on pointe and as a ballet company that is not unusual until those points become three or even four at a time. In extreme deliberation of the gesture, Chouinard integrates crutches, rope, prostheses, horizontal bars, and harnesses into her outrageously creative choreography. These props that could fetter some gives this master of movement a whole new vocabulary. Manipulations of Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations by Bach adds to this aberrant ballet that looks at the age old story of the beauty and the beast. 2007, 50 minutes 6:00pm Contemporary Dance Theatre (viewer discretion) (2 films = 75 minutes)

Chunky Move, a contemporary dance company in Australia founded by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek in 1995, has earned an enviable reputation for producing a distinct yet unpredictable brand of genre-defying dance performance. Chunky Move’s work constantly seeks to redefine what is or what can be contemporary dance within an ever-evolving Australian culture. In Dance Like Your Old Man, six women imitate their dads’ dancing in a film about fathers as seen through the eyes of their daughters. These unseen men come to life through the dances and reflections of their children.

2006, 10 minutes; Best Documentary short film Melbourne International Film Festival Here After – (viewer discretion)

At the crossroads of fiction and dance, this film is an adaptation of Puur (2005), by Belgium director and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez. It combines excerpts from the Super 8 short film that accompanied the performance with 16 mm images from the studio and on location at Oye-Plage. The performers dance to the sounds of Fausto Romitelli and David Eugene Edwards (Woven Hand), and words of author P. F. Thomese. Through flashbacks, Here After tells the story of an isolated community in which a power-mad tyrant commands an infanticide. In the danced sequences we see how the victims relive their memories in the hereafter, as though their emotions and traumas had permeated their bodies. Inspired by ancient biblical myths on the massacre of children, the film indirectly denounces today's genocide, terrorism and war. Depicting terror and its devastating effects on a community, the film explores such existential questions as life/death, culpability/penance, identity/memory, regret/negation and power/freedom. 2007, 65 minutes, 'Creativity Award' from the National Film Board of Canada at the FIFA (Festival International du Film sur l'Art) in Montreal. -- www.dancecamerawest.org