There have been a lot of debates on a potential crisis of certain art forms. Since the last century, critics were talking about the imminent death of literature, of the impossibility of finding special word combinations. The same thing is felt, for example, in the film world, since, at the thematic level, many areas seem to be exhausted. However, certain forms of artistic expression, such as dance, continue to be as fresh as ever, despite the fact that they have a permanent correlation to pre-established / “traditional” formulas. ‘Align‘ is an experimental short film that captures precisely this perennial beauty of dance, creating a bridge between two seemingly disjointed aesthetic dimensions, to suggest not only the “resistance” of this subtle artistic language but also the intimate need of people to find emotional comfort in this poetry of movement. In a somewhat sub-textual way, the vision of director R.E. Wolfe draws inspiration from Pina Bausch’s famous quote (“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”), accessing an area familiar to any spectator to surprise with a fine sense of framing and editing two choreographic dimensions created by Bess Noakes-Kettel who depicts subtle connections between two complementary manners of understanding the aesthetic potential of the body: ballet and pole dance.
Thus, the filming strategy attacks two harmonising choreographic universes that, evolving on the principles of a black and white parallelism between two individualities, expressively explore several metamorphoses of the body language coexisting in our present. In R.E. Wolfe’s vision, everything evolves horizontally and vertically, while between the rehearsal rooms, there are established balanced relationships pushing the dancers towards a continuous gestural reinterpretation. More specifically, the bodies of the two female dancers become sensitive and aesthetic instruments in which the geometrical perfection of the positions and movements are complemented by their inherent passion and by their need to find a new way of communicating with others. Likewise, the musical dimension of this short film (signed by Dan Daniels) whose structure alternates between the classical and the modern registers, supports the choreographic transitions between the two kinetic universes. As such, it mentally transports the spectators both in the opulent interiors of the philharmonic and in the “black boxes” of the underground spaces, highlighting the dancers’ gestural interdependence.
