EXPS/SLC: Fall 2023 Programs
Experimental Series - Salt Lake City (EXPS/SLC) is a screening series hosted at the Union Theater at the University of Utah. Understanding the need for experimental, avant-garde, and otherwise alternative media in resistance to narrative and other forms prominent already in Salt Lake City, the series invites films directed by women, queer, non-binary, and disabled creators. Screenings incorporate a variety of themes, but are rooted in personal, experimental, experiential, and radical approaches to movement, dance, choreography, and/or the body on screen. Screenings are free and open to all university and community members. More information can be found on the series Instagram - @exps.slc and on the University of Utah - School of Dance site here.
Location: The Union Theater is located on the first floor of the Student Union at 200 S Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. For wheelchair access/power doors into the union, enter from the east, opposite the parking lot, go straight through the lobby, turn left along the first hallway, and go right to the end, where the theater is on your left. General parking and visitors with disability placards may park in any spot in the visitor’s parking lot to the east of the Student Union. Map of the theater can be found here.
The theater is ADA accessible with comfortable room for mobility devices. Trigger warnings (if applicable) will be given before each program. All films in all programs will have subtitles. ASL interpreters can be provided at the screening with at least two weeks advance notice. For accessibility-specific questions, please contact: kym.mcdaniel@utah.edu.
We would like to especially thank the artists in the program, as well as those who submitted to our open call via FilmFreeway. Additional thanks include faculty and staff within the School of Dance, Film & Media Arts Department, and U of U Transform, especially Will Maguire, Chris Lippard, and Angela Smith.
For other inquiries about our programs this season please email exps.slc@gmail.com.
Arrival/Departure // Tues. Aug 29 - 7:30pm // Union Theater // TRT TBD
Two Asian performers facing one another in front of a large white building. One performer wears a light blue shirt and dark blue pants. The other performer wears a long black dress. Clear blue sky peaks out behind the white building.
The Introspection of Denied Agency, dir. Fanxi Sun (16mm - Digital, 8:23, USA, 2023)
A grainy Super 8 image of a sunflower surrounded by leafy greens. White text in the middle of the image reads swaying.
bumbling, dir. Tristen Ives (Super 8 - Digital, 6:55, USA, 2023)
come and find me.
A close up of an Asian-Canadian dancer/performer washed in a soft gold light. Her hand is raised in gentle motion, her attention focused on the gesture.
xīn nī 廖芯妮 (understanding you), dir. Jasmine Liaw (Digital, 7:26, Canada, 2022)
An auto ethnographical moving-portrait where a dancer’s movement is made up of her family’s ancestral artifacts. Responding to a recorded inter-generational conversation with her father, she reaffirms her identity while navigating and trying to understand more within her Hakka diaspora.
Elisa, an Indigenous performer, wears a patterned purple, white, and orange dress. Her arms reach up to a nearby tree and tree branch, leaves bare with winter. She ties a white cloth around the tree limb.
Muscogee (Creek) Hymn, dir. Elisa Harkins (Digital, 3:30, 2019)
Performed and sung by Elisa Harkins and Dannie Wesley. Shot by Ian Byers-Gamber. Recorded by Mark Kuykendall. Produced and edited by Elisa Harkins.
Espoketis Omes Kerreskos is a Muscogee (Creek) Hymn that was sung on the Trail of Tears and continues to be sung in Muscogee Creek churches today.
Espoketis omes kerreskos,
This may be the last time we do not know,
1 Mekusapvlke vpeyvnna
The Christians have gone on...
2 Pumvpvltake vpeyvnna
Our others have gone on...
3 Cvwantake vpeyvnna
My sisters have gone on...
A stem of pink peonies plastered against a bright red wall with blue duct tape. An elegant light-skinned hand with shimmering pink nail polish holds the duct tape in place.
3 Peonies, dir. Stephanie Barber (16mm - Digital, 3:13, USA, 2017)
A brief, poetic 16mm film of a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. The reverence for beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field painting of high modernism that, in many cases, eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty. The collaged soundtrack subtly contemplates mental illness and is gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.
A 16mm image of bright, curricular light which fills the whole frame.
This Is How I Felt, dir. Josh Weissbach (16mm - Digital, 1:35, USA, 2022)
This Is How I Felt was filmed in a twenty-four period while the filmmaker was wearing a heart monitor to investigate possible arrhythmias.
A blue and white cyanotype image of the anatomy of a torso.
La próxima te acompaño (next time i'll join you), dir. Camila Dron (Digital, 1:00, Argentina, 2023)
The result of the combination of various animation techniques and supports, both physical and digital. The process begins by converting computerized images of a person's interior into blueprints. This work seeks to play and expand the notion of the representations that technology offers us about the interior of our own body.
A 16mm grainy image with black and white swirls and fractures throughout the frame.
Cecilia Araneda (16mm - Digital, 4:40, Canda, 2021)
Shot at Bate Island in Ottawa, landing is made from hand-processed B&W 16 mm film hand-coloured with organic and photochemical tones, video and found sound. landing examines moments of respite in between flight and movement.
A hand-drawn image, green swirls and loops collaged with the outline of a lower body, hand, and indistinguishable cursive handwriting.
Beautiful Figures, dir. Soetkin Verstegen (Digital, 4:01, Belgium, 2022)
Thoughts ripple over the pages of a personal notebook, kept during a stay at different science labs in Zürich. They float from one to another, like a mind map of unfinished ideas on memory, medical imaging, cells, and aging.
A black and white image of two light-skinned hands almost clasped together, the image is slightly cloudy with an overlay on top.
elemental, dir. Leo Ryan (16mm - Digital, 4:24, USA, 2022)
Elemental is an embodied experiment in movement and sound that features the choreographer and dancer Marika Niko.
A light-skinned hand reaches into a jar of Kombucha Scobygooby, a shiny floating material made of bacteria and yeast. Sun streams in from a window outside the frame.
Half Life, dir. Laura Iancu (Digital, 4:00, Romania, 2023)
Different worlds at different time scales.
Green, dark brown, and white swirls create an impressionistic still image of a creek in motion.
Damp Moss, dir. Christopher Thompson (Super 8 - Digital, 4:22, USA, 2023)
Glittering illusions of vectorized providence attempt to emulate an inherited physical realm of diminishing significance.
A pile of breaks and a small figurine placed in front of them. A light-skinned hand gestures a finger towards the miniature figurine.
the information, dir. Stephanie Barber (VHS/16mm to Digital, 1:12, USA, 2022)
sometimes, among the rubble of the endless forgetting and re-membering of our personal and collective histories, an artifact emerges. a clue, a document. hard evidence. maybe we struggle to contextualize these fragments, maybe we marry them to other fragments and build new narratives in an attempt to squint back through the past and explain to ourselves how we got here. the information is a short exclamation mark of a video, fragments asserting themselves as whole auto-ethnographies.
A multicolored and thermal colored (bright blue and purples) close-up image of a man’s face. There is a man wearing a scuba outfit and gear underwater superimposed onto the close-up of the first man’s face.
Emotional Sundiving, dir. Tony Balko ( Digital, 15:27, USA, 2012)
Considers the New Age as a path toward total fulfillment. The Sun’s rays are transmuted into the substances of life through the power of belief.
Special thanks to Tony Balko for having EXPS/SLC program his work in tonight’s screening.
A woman at the side of a lake during sunset. The sky fades from a dark blue into green, yellow, and orange. The lake is calm with ripples.
Cabbage, dir. Holly Márie Parnell (Digital, 24:42min, Ireland/Canada, 2023)
An intimate film made in collaboration with the filmmaker’s family, Cabbage reframes language, illuminating relationships of care at its centre. Bureaucratic violence, which can appear as gentle and bland, is contrasted with lived experience: the film centralises her brother’s writing (who is non-verbal and non-mobile) using eye tracking technology, and her mothers reflections to explore layers of power, and how to reclaim it within an ableist paradigm.
The film takes place in the months leading up to an international move from Canada back home to Ireland – a country they had to leave a decade prior due to severe cuts in disability services. Dissecting layers of language, agency and power, the film is a subtle examination of how a human life is measured and valued.
Desiree, a Black woman with dark skin, gestures with her arms and hands raised towards a body of water off screen. She wears a bright blue raincoat. Her expression is thoughtful and yearning. Behind her, various performers with disabilities are in motion.
Terrestrial Crip Drift - Roosevelt Island, dir. Petra Kuppers (Digital, 10:50min, USA, 2023)
A group of disabled dance artists meet on Roosevelt Island in New York City, a historical site of hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons. They dance, happy to be in each other’s company and in the shadows of people who hadn't chosen to be here. Swirling dates and milestones through their bodymindspirits, they move with and alongside nature, sculpture, community, and the past. An Olimpias Disability Culture Production 2023.