Match Box Dances
Match Box Dances is a short, four-part dance film shot on the streets, sidewalks and loading docks of DUMBO, Brooklyn.
Choreography: Adam H Weinert
Videography Directed & Edited by Philippe Tremblay-Berberi
Music, Sound Design & Mix: Roarke Menzies
Dance Artists: Charlotte Bydwell, Naomi Reid Davis, Carlye Eckert, Logan Frances Kruger, Adam H Weinert
Costume Design: Marion Talan
Find out more and watch the full video at matchboxdances.com
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Selected press quotes about Match Box Dances:
“Match Box Dances is a contemplation of New York’s backward glances, those anxious looks the city seems to cast at its own rapidly disappearing, irretrievable past. It’s a film in which fleeting movements are set against the backdrop of the more lasting, but still impermanent, decaying brick and concrete of the Brooklyn docklands.
Dancers, fittingly, clutch tape recorders. The slipping focus, scratched celluloid, subdued colors are the stuff of nostalgia, but the dancers themselves seem to want to carry with them into the document—not just their images—but their discontent, their deep rebellion against the humiliation of impermanent physicality. The movements—broad, graceful, expansive semaphores punctuated by the tiny, compact gestures of an incensed, but ultimately non-communicative, sign language—are created, repeated, passed to others, but ultimately they recede and vanish no matter how personal, or even violent, their manifestation.
The film is a fascinating, beautiful evocation of those pockets of movement, architecture, desire, and emotion that time permits us and then quickly, casually lays to waste.”
- Andrew Alexander of Creative Loafing
“Weinert and his collaborators have taken humanity and diced it into four beautiful, complicated parts, four tiny parts of a huge whole, but all explored with depth, appreciation and the unequivocally beautiful care of artists.”
- From Match Box Dances: A Collaboration On Humanity by Kristin McCrory
“The haunting work won us over from the first shot, a dance in yellow filmed on the streets of grimy, beautiful DUMBO. The collaboration between choreographer Adam Weinert, dancer Naomi Reid-Davis, musician Roarke Menzies and other assorted neighbors captured the seductive grit of industrial Brooklyn in the way that every edgy fashion shoot tries, and fails, to do.”
- Paul Cox, BushwickBK
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Achievements and screening history:
- Selected as Editor’s Pick by Dance Magazine May 2011
- Center for Performance Research Brooklyn, NY January 2012
- Monument-Movement at MUSE Center for Photography and the Moving Image New York, NY November-December 2011
- VideoDance Barcelona Spain December 2011
- Spectacular! Spectacular! at The Arts Exchange Atlanta, GA November 2011
- Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema in Bolder, CO October 2011
- Cinedans Festival Amsterdam 2011
- Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival Montreal, QC June 2011
- Bushwick Open Studios 2011 Brooklyn, NY June 2011
- Envelope Space Brooklyn, NY April 2011
- SITE Fest Brooklyn, NY March 2010