After 35 years of performing and teaching internationally, SANDY SILVA started the Migration Dance Film Project (MDFP) with award-winning director Marlene Millar. Their dance-for-camera films have screened internationally and won numerous awards, engaging artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic disciplines — dancers, singers and musicians — and brought communities together to move beyond traditional body percussion, expanding the depth of rhythmic folk dance vocabulary within and as a contemporary art form. In MDFP, performance-based narratives follow a cast of ten dancer-singers as they travel where song, rhythm and movement envelop us through communal voyage and the powerful storyline anchored in migration — movement through journeying.
- The films explore migratory experience for the artists themselves and the communities they engage with as nomadic storytellers, connected by the intimate knowledge of individual and shared experiences in unison. The films portray renewing interpretations between hushed abstract formations and the defiant personal gravity that displacement deeply imprints.
- Sound plays an equally prominent role throughout the progression of these stories where the performers’ audible connection to the different landscapes and surfaces they navigate are as telling in narrative form as the deeply breathtaking visuals.
- Silva’s choreographies and compositions translates through Millar’s camera in a porous lingering resonance, an assemblage of sound design, montage, and alternative screens all residing as visceral convergence opening possibilities and offering an intimacy impossible to see or hear on a live stage.
- Visit the MIGRATION DANCE FILM PROJECT page to learn more and to view films.