Directed by Argentinian filmmaker Agostina Galvez, Making Movements takes a look behind the scenes at the making of The Pike and the Shield: Five Paradoxes with ballerina Nozomi Iijima, commissioned for The Fifth Sense, and a look at the world of dance through the eyes of leading female choreographers and dancers including Holly Blakey, Aya Sato and the duo Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley who make up Project O, each speaking on their relationship with movement and designing sequences through their physical bodies in both motion and form.
The concept of this project is the dual nature we have within ourselves - the strong parts and weak parts - and how they conflict inside of you. I’m expressing that paradox through dance. In both my life and dance, I’m in tune with my intuition so I've really just lived the way I feel and the way I approach ballet is the same - Nozomi Iijima
Dancing makes me feel like who I am. I care so much about dance and if that’s how you feel about something - it can be anything - you’ll find a way to make your own way through it. I think through being honest with myself, I found a movement language that felt I was answering myself authentically.The difficult thing and beautiful thing about dance is that it’s about the body, the mind and the delivery of course. For me, it’s about working sensitively with bodies to create movement - Holly Blakey
We’re not really consciously developing a movement language, more a practice of how we frame or talk about composing. We structure our movement together and then we have our individual movement practices that feed into that or become content somehow in the spaces we make for and as Project O. We improvise to try to explore the potentials of our bodies in different spaces while trying to recognise the impact those spaces have on movement - Project O
My mum was a ballerina but I didn’t think I really wanted to do something like dancing until I started to in High School. I don’t have anybody in my mind when I’m performing, I just want to perform. I’m a dancer and I think if you move to music everybody could be a dancer - there are no rules. You can do whatever you want because that’s what I’ve always done and that’s what I’m still doing - Aya Sato