Zodiak - Center for New Dance, as the foremost production house for contemporary dance in Finland, presents 8-10 premieres every year. As part of this co-production process, Zodiak puts great attention to the creation of various visual materials for and from these performances.

Many choreographers’ curiosity and generosity to open their work to a different medium as a common thread ignited the application process to seek funding, in order to take these dialogues further and test their practice-based applications.

Eventually this spark resulted in the project titled Zodiak Visions, where filmmakers/visual artists and choreographers have been invited to come together to re-imagine the stage productions; as film. 

During the contextualization of Zodiak Visions, with full consideration of the intricacies of opening up a stage work to the film medium, the historical models of “dance on film”, “dance for film” and “dance as film” were carefully examined. The project was then firmly situated in a position where an ontological parity between dance and film is established, and a true collaboration between the choreographer–filmmaker pairs is realized. Where, both mediums operate as co-constitutive forces within a shared creative process and special attention given to avoid subjugating one medium to the other, for example, using film merely as a creative documentation device or, conversely, utilizing dance only as visual material without giving sufficient attention to kinesthetic complexity and embodied agency.

This positioning also responds to a contemporary condition in which dance films are frequently segregated into isolated platforms in their public presentation, as well as in their production and funding structures. They are often detached from broader film culture, even though contemporary dance and experimental film circulated within overlapping avant-garde contexts throughout much of their history.

By foregrounding hybrid dramaturgies and employing genre-bending approaches, the project aimed to create short films capable of entering international film festival circuits rather than remaining confined to dance-focused platforms. In doing so, while opening up possibilities to reach new audiences, the project also sought to reactivate a deep-rooted historical dialogue between performance, dance, and cinema, and to re-situate contemporary dance within a wider cinematic ecology.

With respect to the plural suffix in the project title vision-s, outcomes have been manifold, and contemporary in true Zodiak fashion, from genre-bending fantastical thriller to absurdist existential humor. All very strongly honoring the deep-rooted historical ties between the experimental film, dance and performance fields.

Short films; Everything is Right Before, Reddening, Jellymama, Kielo are the four gems revealed by this process.

*The Zodiak Visions project also includes the VR Documentation of Will Funk For Food: A Fistful of Funk, which can be viewed through the Second Theatre app on virtual platforms.