The third annual Dance Film Festival by Circuit Arts is a triple hit, bringing dance to the screen, stage, and community, where you can experience the joy of movement yourself. The three-day festival runs Thursday, Sept. 24 through Saturday, Sept. 26, with programs taking place at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury and the Yard in Chilmark.
Lisa Gross, programmer for the festival, notes about this year’s theme, “Every year reveals itself to me as I’m doing my programming. This time I was focused on how the camera works with the dancer in a very different way, which might be because we are doing a dance film workshop.” Working with co-creator Sophia Attebery, a dancer and filmmaker, and Danielle Mulcahy, creative director and filmmaker at Circuit Arts, they have been running dance film labs all summer, with dancers from the community coming in to explore how the camera and choreography work together, and, in particular, how the camera can become one of the dancers.
The festival kicks off Thursday, Sept. 24, at 7 pm at Grange Hall with the Dance Shorts Program, “The Dancing Camera,” a 51-minute collection of 10 international dance films exploring movement, emotion, human connection, conflict, memory, competition, technology, and joy.
The program includes films from the U.K., U.S., Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Israel, showcasing a wide range of approaches to dance filmmaking. Highlights include “Spoken Movement Family Honour,” winner of multiple international dance-film awards; “JA Robot Club,” which pairs six dancers with six programmable robots; “MASS,” featuring 40 dancers moving as a collective force in formations; and “Podium,” a joyful, playful work featuring 19 dancers from the Batsheva Ensemble. “I was focused on films that took the camera and choreography to a higher level of integration,” says Gross. “Each film has a very individual way of using the camera.”
Abby Bender, co-founder and director of the Built on Stilts Dance Festival, and friends will emcee the event, with short live performances woven throughout the film program.
On Friday, Sept. 25, at 7 pm at the Grange Hall, the festival presents “Gatherings,” a long-form program pairing of David Hinton’s acclaimed short dance film “Touched” with the feature documentary “Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede.”
The 12-minute-long “Touched” transforms an ordinary night at a North London bar into an intimate choreography of faces, hands, bodies, conversations, dancing, laughter, conflict, and touch, exploring the powerful emotional impact of movement. “It’s very close-up in this sort of boozy, party atmosphere, and from that, these stylized movements happen throughout.”
The 2026 documentary “Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede” chronicles the closing of a beloved LGBTQ country-western bar in San Francisco after nearly three decades. Through the memories of the people who found community there, the film celebrates the bar’s legacy, and the queer cowboys and cowgirls who made it a cherished gathering place. “They’ve had this weekend event for 27 years, and it’s the last time before it’s closed down. It’s a beautiful comment on acceptance, community, and the collective joy of dance and movement. It just opens your heart. It’s about people coming together, and I think that’s one of the beautiful things about dance — it does bring joy collectively to everybody when you’re in a room together and moving,” Gross says. Appropriately, following the films, audience members are invited downstairs to put what they’ve seen into motion with a line-dancing class, led by Jill Gross.
The festival concludes on Saturday, Sept. 26, from 9 am to 1 pm, with a dance film workshop at the Yard for participants ages 16 and up, open to all experience levels. Gross says, “We’ll be using ideas from the films we’ll be showing in the shorts screening as a basis for creating the dance. It will be a chance to learn what goes into making a dance film, and how choreography for film differs from choreography for the stage. Instead of thinking about being an audience member, you have to think about you being the camera.” Presented by Circuit Arts and the Yard with support from the Mass Cultural Council, the workshop will have participants create and film a “shorter than short” dance film — a small, focused work that uses movement, framing, location, and editing to discover what becomes possible when choreography moves from the stage to the screen.
Gross stresses that the festival is not just for dancers: “I want it to be universal. I want everybody to feel that joy of movement through film, and for people to see something they’ve never seen before and think, ‘Wow, that was fun!’”
Pay-what-you-can tickets are available at circuitarts.org/mvdff. A full listing of Circuit Arts events can be found at circuitarts.org/events.
