Thank you for your polemical and fabulously ill-informed op-ed bit. However, better to be talked about than [not]. Have much to discuss about grown up attitudes to creativity generally and dance film in particular and not getting bent out of shape choreographically, pre-supposing one has the vaguest notion of what "shape" might be in the first place.
Put your name and credentials where your mouth is please and by the way, vis-a-vis calendars. South East Dance operates the Arts Council Calendar which I believe bears absolutely no relation to any other temporal orientation whatsoever.
We had no option [on] our dates, driven as we were by the expediencies of Riverside programming and for your information - until September 2007 SED did not give the dates to anyone other than the group at MEDIA & DANCE, approximately three months after we had announced the LIDFF dates, however, for the last 18 months, owing to a clearly defined curatorial policy which has been wilfully and occasionally mischievously identified as "anti" conceptualist, we have been deliberately ignored by a huge swathe of what could be arguably referred to as the "dance" film community, AKA the scholastic tendency.
Anti nada, please check our programming for a practical rebuttal of any revisionist or reactionary accusations. hmmmmm..............
Sandy Strallen
Curator LIDFF
I think the general public and, particularly, the relatively small dance film audience could care less about the scheduling problems of festival organisers. I would imagine that all they would ask is that they not be programmed on exactly the same dates, if it's not too much trouble, which clearly it is when assessing the debacle that is this particular case.
Perhaps venues, festival organisers and the others involved in the arts administrative infrastructure would like to drag themselves out of the 19th century and stop programming things so far in advance and, apparently, in secret they they, inevitably, begin clashing events on the same dates.
If the LIDFF and SED were kids I think the pair of you would be getting your heads knocked together.
If you want to know who we are, then you have only to look!
