Filmmaker: Eleni Cay

Goraikou by Eleni Cay

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Slovakian poet Eleni Cay‘s latest dancepoem video features dancer Roberta Stepankova. The text appears in her third and latest pamphlet (chapbook), A Small Love Dictionary Of Untranslatable Japanese Words.

Sun-Earth Diglossia by Eleni Cay

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This is the latest and last in Slovakian poet Eleni Cay‘s “celestial dialogues” series of dancepoems. She describes the project on her website:

I’m proud to be part of the generation who challenge discriminatory forms of sharing and creating poetry. I’m particularly interested in spaces that augment content and form into novel poetic genres. In my dancepoems, I’ve been experimenting with music, dance and poetry to see if carefully controlled convergence of three arts can give rise to a new poetic experience.

Between 2015 and 2017, I was fortunate to work with three very talented dancers. The theme binding our three dancepoems together is celestial dialogues- conversations between The Sun and The Earth, The Moon and The Sun, and The Earth and The Moon. When thinking about these conversational duets, the search for a ying-yang balance becomes a quest for unity and departure from human-imposed hierarchies.

If the Earth spoke to the Moon, what would she say? And if the Moon talked to the Sun, would they remember the times when they were one? The perennial themes of love and separation somewhat always find their way into a poem…

Dual Focus Media shot the video, with music by Armand Amar. Cay’s dance partner, Dickson Mbi, was the choreographer, and Christian Payne provided the voiceover.

A Request by Eleni Cay

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A love poem for the 21st century by Eleni Cay, who says on YouTube:

This filmpoem is for all those who are frustrated that their partners love their phones more than the time they can spend together!

My big thanks to MK [Milton Keynes] Poet Laureate Mark Niel for the voiceover & guitar, James [Wright] for the sound and all the anonymous filmmakers whose footage I found at Shutterstock.

Sun/Moon Diglossia (Dancepoem) by Eleni Cay

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Eleni Cay is poet, filmmaker and dancer here. Her dance partner, Chris Bradley, is the choreographer. Music is by David Garrett, and Sarah Jane Mukherjee and Christian Payne provided the voiceovers. To read the text of the poem, click through to YouTube.

Cay is a researcher originally from Slovakia, and is currently poet-in-residence at Westbury Arts Centre in Milton Keynes, UK. She has an essay up at Poetryfilmkanal, “Poetryfilms: when poetry and film have a flirt.”