Chased

Chased is a dance-film set on a bog in the mountains of Ireland. One of the questions we were exploring was:
“How would the Irish have danced if our history unfolded differently?” – if we were truly free – free to allow the urges and desires which are born deep inside the dancer to surface on the body unimpeded?

Our visual inspiration for the film was Caravaggio’s painting The Taking of Christ – treated simply (and non-religiously) as a group of people, engaged in a specific act – members of a pack, hunting, always hungry, always searching.

Director Michèle Manahan writes: “We find the dancers out on the bog, free; squelching sounds of bare feet sinking into the brown, sodden earth, in a wind that howls over an old landscape … a landscape that will give up its secrets about who we are and who we have been, if we dig deep enough into the land and into the body.”

Chased was a winner in the My Dance Film competition at the 2019 Dance On Camera Festival in New York, and as such screened in the Lincoln Center as part of the festival.