"He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Moving Cities is stunning. Blurring the line between art and everyday life, the collection of short films captures dancers performing outside in urban environments. The result is a surreal re-envisioning of quotidian spaces--subway tunnels, bus stops, street corners--as locations of beauty and inspiration. The World Dances spoke with Moving Cities director Jevan Chowdhury about the films and the processes involved in creating them.

How did the idea for the project come about?

I love the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and was inspired by that when I thought of exploring cities in this dream-like, meditative way. There's no talking in the films. The only communication is through movement, whether it be a bus, a car, or a dancer.

I had been given a few commissions to produce dance films in the commercial sense. I've always really enjoyed working with dancers and the idea of movement, but less so in the music video sense, which is traditionally where you might find dance and screen coming together. I did a bit of ballet when I was a kid but I didn't really enjoy it, to be honest. I was really young and my parents sort of pushed me into the classes. It seemed more about routine and structure and someone telling you what to do. But if you go to a club or are in your own home, just moving in response to some rhythm, that's completely different and more what I'm interested in. Of course, a lot of the dancers in the films are professionals, but I'm more into that primal movement.

How do you create and capture that sense?

What I find really interesting is that the dancers are being instinctively responsive to whatever's around them. You can't actually repeat a lot of the stuff we've filmed because they've made it up in response to a specific moment. It's different from dancing on a stage because when you dance in real life the ambiance of the place around you--the people and the cars and the trains or whatever else--becomes the sound track.

There's one thing you can't get away from, and that's the adrenaline side to it. The locations are not stages, not safe places in terms of audiences. They're very open and very public. The dancers might be quite far away from the cameras and very isolated in some ways. There will be safety stewards around, but the dancers are on their own. It creates an adrenaline rush and that contributes to the way they dance. I find that to be one of the things captured in each film--the dancer having to internally perform in such an external environment. Read more here.

By Tamara Johnson