On October 11, art enthusiast and Staff Writer Trisha Karmakar checked out a Movement Lab film screening as part of the Moving Body-Moving Image Initiative. 

Since 2018, Barnard professor and filmmaker Gabri Christa has curated screen dance films for the Moving Body-Moving Image Initiative (MBMI). Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the MBMI’s public film screening at Barnard’s Movement Lab. Typically, MBMI’s films explore themes of social justice through the vessel of the human body. This year’s screening was centered around environmentalism, entangled personal histories, and their portrayals through black and brown bodies. The films screened were Terra Mater – Mother Land by Kantarama Gahigiri, The Noise My Leaves Make by Tia-Monique Uzor, and Kankantri (The Silk Cotton Tree) by Gabri Christa. 

In Terra Mater – Mother Land, Gahigiri delivers a passionate call for global accountability for the impacts of capitalism, neocolonialism, and environmental destruction in East Africa. The film features poignant stills of a goddess donning pieces of electronic waste and standing atop a pile of junk. Here, I did wonder if, to some degree, these stills took away from the same urgency as later shots of individuals protesting for equality. The lack of interpersonal dialogue felt like a reference to the forced silence imposed on the land and people. The physical juxtaposition between the body and the devastated landscape poses a fundamental question: where is the space for environmental healing amidst the wasteland? 

This theme is carried into the next film, Uzor’s The Noise My Leaves Make, where the dancers blur the boundaries between body and land. Three women spin joyously through the rural English countryside—weaving through fields and tumbling through soil. In a celebration of womanhood, and through a blend of African and contemporary dance, the dancers jubilantly reclaim spaces like the countryside that they have historically been denied ownership of. The film was, however, only seven minutes long, and I was left wondering if I would have drawn more from it had it been longer.

For me, the stand-out piece was “Kankatantri (The Silk Cotton Tree)” which draws inspiration from Christa’s Surinamese roots. It follows a woman as she enters a house of worship, dances, and is visited by her ancestors who guide her towards reconciliation with her myriad identities. Here, dance becomes a medium to interact with our past and future bodies. Particularly as a long-time Bharatnatyam (Indian classical dance) dancer—I was caught off-guard when I recognized several traditional steps, which led me to look up the history of Suriname. I was surprised to learn how intertwined our cultures are. 

In a post-screening talk, Christa mentioned that the choice to include vignettes of diverse ancestors was deliberate. She conceived the film when she began digging into her ancestry and had to come to terms with a difficult history entrenched in slavery. She reclaims this history by coming face-to-face with the past in a literal sense. The visitations from ancestors are almost surrealist—the dreamlike nature of these scenes helped her depict her own journey of discovering her ancestry without being didactic or prescriptive, to be inclusive of the diverse histories of Surinamese people. It was also fascinating to hear Christa talk about how she prepares to portray the moving body on screen: each movement is choreographed with intentionality, and each camera angle is planned meticulously—such as the shots of the dancer spinning in the synagogue and digging her feet into the synagogue’s sand.

All three films explored different facets of Black identities through dance—transitioning from our ties to the land to our ties to others, and, ultimately, our ties to the past. After each film, there was a hushed silence. I may have gone into the screening not quite knowing what to expect, but, based on the thunderous applause at the end of the screening, I know I’m not alone when I say that I left feeling that I had witnessed some truly profound works of art.

Image via Movement Lab