Experiencing Interruptions?

Landfall

Landfall offers a sensory fantasy of naturalism, a hallucinatory look at the human body in nature. Playing with a visual edge between organic and artificial, Landfall wonders, yearningly, whether we humans belong in the natural world…or are we visitors, outsiders, a kind of alien?  

  • Kate Weare
    Director
    Director
  • Jack Flame Sorokin
    Director
    Co-Director
  • Nicole Vaughan-Diaz
    Key Cast
  • Thryn Saxon
    Key Cast
  • Kate Weare Company
    Producer
  • Kate Weare
    Choreographer
  • Jack Flame Sorokin
    Cinematographer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Dance, Art, Nature
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes 49 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 20, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    6,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Kate Weare, Jack Flame Sorokin

Kate Weare
Choreographer and Artistic Director of Kate Weare Company

Kate Weare is recognized as a preeminent American choreographer whose dances merge the mind and the gut through the power and persuasiveness of the moving body. Brought up by a painter and a printmaker in Oakland, California, Weare draws on visual art in her work, as well as a fascination with language, poetry, contemporary music, psychology and nature. Weare received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts and danced in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Belgrade and Montreal before settling in New York City. She founded Kate Weare Company in 2005 and steadily gained recognition for her uncompromising, articulate choreographic vision.

As a choreographer, Weare's awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award, the Aninstantia Foundation Fellowship Award, the Danceworks Residency Award, White Bird’s Barney Choreographic Prize; Inaugural BAM Fisher Artist-in-Residency and Commission Award; Inaugural Evelyn Sharp Summer Artist-in-Residency Award at CalArts; The Joyce Theater’s Mellon Foundation Residency Award; and The Princess Grace Choreography Fellowship. She has been awarded artistic residencies at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, CalArts, Bates Dance Festival, Djerassi and Dance New Amsterdam (DNA), and many institutions have commissioned her work, including BAM, The Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Bates Dance Festival and Dance Theater Workshop. Weare has also shared her choreographic vision in faculty positions such as Guest Artist at Princeton University, and in residencies at Juilliard, NYU/Tisch, Virginia Commonwealth University, Keene State University and Marymount Manhattan, among other educational institutions.

Kate Weare Company has been presented nationwide by Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, ArtPower at UC San Diego, Ringling Museum of Art, Dance Celebration Philadelphia, Spring to Dance St. Louis, Northrop Concerts and Lectures at the University of Minnesota, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, among numerous other venues and festivals. In New York, the company has been presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Joyce Theater, BRIC, Guggenheim Works & Process, Fall for Dance at New York City Center, The 92nd St. Y, Symphony Space, The Skirball Center, Dancemopolitan at Joe’s Pub, Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church.

Weare’s most recent work involves exploring dance on film in collaboration with filmmaker Jack Flame Sorokin. Weare and Sorokin just completed their first experimental film, “Landfall,” and are currently working on their second, “Moth.”

Jack Flame Sorokin
Photographer and Filmmaker

Jack Flame Sorokin began his career at age 15 by assisting documentary filmmakers and celebrity portrait photographers in NYC. His early photographs of friends and family earned him several youth awards including recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011. In 2015 he received a BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Sorokin is a freelance editorial and commercial photographer and filmmaker based in Western North Carolina; his artwork focuses on our connection as human beings to each other and our environment. 

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Director Statement

Director’s Statement: Kate Weare

I am a contemporary dance choreographer who, during covid, began to develop a new direction for my choreographic practice in film. I found a collaborator in Jack Flame Sorokin, a photographer and filmmaker.

In the summer of 2020, I brought two of my company dancers, Thryn Saxon and Nicole Vaughan-Diaz, from NYC to the Blue Ridge Mountains for an experimental 10-day shoot in nature. As we explored movement in natural sites, I realized that working in nature felt different from anything I had experienced before.

Perhaps it has to do with the immensity of time that nature operates from, or its extraordinary physical magnitude when pressed against our own bodies. During the first few days of shooting, I experienced a strange pause, and fear rising: Are we natural? Are we a part of nature? Are we even supposed to be here?  

Jack and I integrated my questions into our process. Could we explore a desire to be a part of nature, and also acknowledge our outsiderness? At this point in evolution, are we humans perhaps aliens or parasites, as evidenced by the onslaught of climate change and Covid 19?

The philosopher Simone Weil said: “To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds. We do not gain insights by going in search of them, but instead by waiting and listening for them.” This is the spirit in which we made "Landfall."