How do we keep ourselves from feeling paralyzed by change? An international group of dancers, choreographers, directors, composers, and more have come together for a five-part series that confronts that increasingly urgent question through movement.
Led by Jacob Jonas of the eponymous Jacob Jonas The Company (previously), the initiative is the latest project for Films.Dance, a platform aiming to make dance accessible and explore its intersections with music, fashion, and film.
Released one by one during the last five weeks, the films center around the theme of beginning again. Presented in the order in which they were created, each confronts the destabilizing, heartbreaking world in which we live by emphasizing beauty and a reverence for nature. They remind us that seeking complete control is futile and that humanity is only a blip in the universe’s timeline.
“Moncalvo” was the first to be released and emerges from a period of profound grief and anxiety. “This film was created in June 2023 during one of the most challenging times in my life, immediately following a battle with stage 4 cancer,” Jonas says. “As I navigated the aftermath of illness and trauma, art became my way of processing the darkness and rediscovering my light.”
Filmed in Moncalvo, Italy, where it gets its name, the work juxtaposes tenderness and intimacy with passion and intense unease, reflecting the inescapable push and pull of healing.
Each part of the series similarly channels the ways feelings can overwhelm. “Infinity” features dancers performing repetitive movements back and forth in a nondescript space. Wearing minimal costumes in neutral tones, the figures carry and drag each other from one end of the frame to the other. Dubbed a “study of the spine,” the short film hones in on the burdens, commitments, and experiences we all carry and what we need for an inevitable release.
The last in the collection is the Dramamine-necessitating “Lotus,” which rapidly shifts from one angle to another like the vertiginous movements of “water in a river, the flame of fire, insects flying, and rain dropping,” he says.
Overall, Jonas shares that the series brings together an international group of artists guided by curiosity and existential queries. “The question is the answer,” he says. “Is life guiding us, or are we in control? Are we all in a cycle of death and rebirth? Is the sun, the moon, and all things living around us in a rotational pull? Are we spinning or still?”
Watch all five films on Vimeo, and follow the latest projects by Jacob Jonas The Company on Instagram.
