Mouvement Perpétuel is an award-winning Montreal-based independent film, video, and new media production company specializing in arts programming. Co-directors Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer create impressionistic dance-media films, arts documentaries and multi-channel video installations, feature expansive choreographies and portraits of some of Canada/Quebec’s leading contemporary dancers and choreographers and from across cultures within the Americas, Europe and Asia. Viewers are invited into a deeply intimate tracing of the curvatures of rich human experience.
Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer met in 1986 dancing in the work of New York choreographer Charles Dennis. Subsequently a friendship developed and their professional talents merged once more ten years later when they embarked on the first sketch of what was later to become the video series Moments in Motion/Au fil du mouvement. They shared a Fellowship for the Dance/Media Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, developing new ideas, and producing work in the United States. Their return to Canada saw the creation of Mouvement Perpétuel in 2001.
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One objective is to guide the viewer’s eye and perception and lead them to an increased sense of body and movement with kinetic images that resonate in the mind.
/ Mouvement Perpétuel /
Marlene Millar
With a background in contemporary dance and design, Montreal filmmaker Marlene Millar created her first award winning film THE WOMAN AND THE SINK in 1989. Marlene received her BFA in Film Production from Concordia University, studied in the graduate programme at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 1999 received a Pew Fellowship in Dance Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In 2001 Marlene and Philip Szporer co-founded the production company MOUVEMENT PERPÉTUEL, directing and producing acclaimed arts documentaries and dance films including BHAIRAVA, 1001 LIGHTS and CRU. Their television broadcast partners have included Bravo!, ARTV, APTN and TéléQuébec. Their work is widely seen in festivals internationally and has been featured at world events including the 2010 Cultural Olympics, the World Exhibition in Shanghai, a UNESCO tour of Latin America.
LAY ME LOW, PILGRIMAGE, MOVE, THE STORM and TRAVERSE are directed by Marlene within the MIGRATION DANCE FILM PROJECT which she established with choreographer Sandy Silva in 2014. Currently on exhibition and on the film festival circuit, films in the series have garnered over twenty awards and prizes to date including Best International Award at Perth’s Screen.Dance Festival; Best Dance Film at Leed’s Aesthetica Short Film Festival; First Prize at Cinematica, Italy; Audience Award for Best Short Dance Film at Cinedans, Amsterdam; Special Jury Prize at Des Arts // Des Cinés in France; Best Screendance Short at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival; the first Prix Lumiere at Cinédanse, Québec and recently the Performing Arts Golden Sheaf Award and nomination for Best in Festival at Yorkton Film Festival – the longest running festival in North America.
Marlene ‘s most personal and ambitious project to date is the essay installation WITNESS, currently featured in her solo exhibition at the THRESHOLD ARTSPACE in Perth, Scotland, along with 30 works that she has directed or co-directed dating back to 1989. The exhibition opened June 5 and runs until Nov 30, 2019.
Credits as Creative Producer include the dance films VANISHING POINTS, HOOP, TURNAROUND TANGO and HANDS ON by director Marites Carino, TWITCH and TALK TO ME by director Jules de Niverville and the installation OUT OF MIES by Lynda Gaudreau. Mentoring emerging filmmakers has been an important part of Marlene’s activities since 1994. She has taught filmmaking workshops across Canada and internationally at institutes such as Centre Imagine in Burkino Faso, Impulstanz in Vienna, University of Bowling Green in Ohio, Loikka Festival in Helsinki, Malakta Art Factory in Finland. In Canada she is a regular guest lecturer in film production at Concordia University, and has mentored documentary filmmakers in Iqaluit, Igloolik, Cambridge Bay and Pangnirtung, Nunavut with the Nunavut Film Development Corporation and the National Film Board of Canada.
Marlene also has an established career as a documentary film editor, having worked at the NFB and for numerous production companies. Active in the independent filmmaking community, Marlene was on the Board of Directors at Main Film for 10 years and is a long-standing member of the Documentary Organization of Canada.
Philip Szporer
Philip Szporer is a Montreal-based filmmaker, writer, and lecturer. He has been immersed in the Canadian dance world for the past 35 years. Currently, he teaches in the Contemporary Dance department, the Faculty of Fine Arts, and the Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability, all at Concordia University. He served as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts (2000-2016). In 1999, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship (National Dance/Media Project), at the University of California, Los Angeles. And in 2010 he was the recipient of the Jacqueline Lemieux Prize awarded by the Canada Council of the Arts. He was recognized with a Distinguished Teaching Award from Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Spring 2016.
In 2001, Philip, along with Marlene Millar, co-founded the Montréal-based award-winning media arts production company, Mouvement Perpétuel. Together they have co-directed and co-produced many documentaries and short dance films to great acclaim. Their work is seen widely at festivals worldwide and at major events such as the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and a UNESCO tour of Latin America.
Mouvement Perpétuel's mandate is to explore the endless possibilities of dance on film, sharing the stories of exceptional artists.
Projects exploring new technologies include Lost Action: Trace, a stereoscopic (3D) live action/animated film with choreographer Crystal Pite, animator Theodore Ushev and produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and Leaning On A Horse Asking For Directions, an interdisciplinary investigation into visual perception and kinesthetic empathy involving multi-channel stereoscopic 3D (S3D) environment for exhibition, and bridging BaGuaZhang martial arts and contemporary dance choreography. Recent new platform productions include 1001 Lights, for gallery/museum installation and CRU a three-part street dance web series for La Fabrique culturelle (Télé-Québec).
More recently, Bhairava, a 14-minute site-specific dance-for-camera film, shot in India, featuring dancer and choreographer Shantala Shivalingappa, has received major acclaim.
Philip has also created Inquiry Into Time and Perception, Study #1, two short video portraits for wall-sized projection installations which act as “windows” opening onto the passions and the ambiguities of physical and emotional manifestation. These studies, created by Mariko Tanabe, draw on a deep vitality, and intrinsic qualities address the senses, intellect, and imagination.
Philip also served as artistic advisor for interactive exhibits and installations, including the Corps rebelles/Rebel Bodies exhibition at the Musée de civilisation in Québec City, and the Toile Mémoire interactive map project created by the Regroupement québecois de danse (RQD).
Audience engagement to further literacy around the discipline of dance and dance-film has taken him around the globe. Philip has guided dance-film workshops in Finland, Portugal, the United States, Israel, and Mexico. He has also worked as a choreographic facilitator in Montreal, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. Mentoring emerging artists in research and dialogue remains an important part of his evolution. He has also given writing workshops and has lectured widely across Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe.
In 2018, he co-founded Dance+Words, with Kathleen Smith, an initiative to disseminate ideas and facilitate conversations around dance and movement arts across Canada.
Philip’s activities as a broadcast journalist have included stints at CBC Radio, Radio-Canada’s radio arts magazine Aux arts, etc., and as correspondent for The World (BBC/WGBH-Boston). His dance writings have been published in The Dance Current, Tanz, and Dance Magazine, among others. Further publications include scholarly essays and chapters in Motion Pictures: Dance’s Duet with the Camera (Palgrave Macmillan), Envisioning Dance on Film and Video (Routledge), and the upcoming Oxford Handbook on Jewishness and Dance in Contemporary Perspective (Oxford University Press).
