Burnout, featuring 18 young people, commissioned by Beaford and Rural Touring Dance Initiative and filmed in summer 2021, was selected for the Los Angeles Dance Shorts Film Festival in Los Angeles on 13 November and online 13–19 November.
With professional dancers filmed in London and dance students from Unlimited Dance Company filmed on Woolacombe Beach, Burnout juxtaposes the urban city and the rural North Devon coast with three professional adult dancers and eighteen youth dancers.
The film, made with hip-hop artist Joshua ‘Vendetta’ Nash and Devon-based filmmaker Gemma Pons, shows the need for people to connect with natural environments to improve wellbeing and uses Krump, a dance style popularised on the streets of Los Angeles in the 2000s. The dancers learned the choreography remotely over Zoom and performed it for the first time together when it was filmed on 6 June 2021.
Claire Ayres, Creative Producer at Beaford, said, “we’re thrilled to be one of only 18 dance films from across the world selected for the 2021 LA Dance Shorts film festival. It’s incredibly exciting to think that our four-minute film, which delivers important messaging and is the product of seven months of hard work, will actually be screened in LA! We’re taking this dance style back to its roots, and with it a piece of North Devon.”
Nash added, “it was incredible working with the young people over Zoom to choreograph a film which has been born directly out of the pandemic, The film is a real celebration of people coming back together, difference and how we can all start to look ahead after a difficult year.”
Burnout was commissioned by Beaford, England’s longest-established rural arts initiative, and the Rural Touring Dance Initiative, a national partnership bringing contemporary UK dance to rural audiences.