Amsterdam-based Danish filmmaker Maia Elisabeth Sørensen underlines to Business Doc Europe how, despite dealing in dance as a director, choreographer, editor and performer, her film work is about so much more.
“I focus on teenagers – the transformation from child to adult, in particular individuals who fall outside of the society’s normative boundaries,” Sørensen says of her approach. “I work with a combination of dance film and documentary, staged choreography and reality.”
“For more than 20 years I have been teaching this age group which has influenced my artistic methodology and expression, as the process and the collaboration with the characters I’m working with are equally important to me as the final work,” she further stresses.
A graduate of the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance (NY), Sørensen is selected for Berlinale Talents, the festival’s annual summit and networking platform for outstanding creatives in the field of audiovisual, held online in 2021.
During the event she has been discussing her current coming-of-age project Nicolaj-Boy Dancing, a hybrid of documentary and staged choreographic scenes.
“[In 2016] Nicolaj was then a 13-year-old boy in a dance class I was filming,” she explains of the story as viewed through the boy’s relationship with dance. “He was completely in his own world, dancing wildly with himself and his own shadow, while the other dance students politely and properly followed the teacher’s instructions. He was not a skilled technical dancer, but I was completely blown away by his presence and passion for dance. Shortly after this meeting I found out that Nicolaj has autism spectrum disorder, which could explain his presence in the dance class, and my interest in dance shifted completely from an aesthetic language to the person dancing.”
“Dance is our mutual interest and has been a way for me to get to know him,” the director adds. “Nicolaj’s dancing, body language and everyday gestures tell something about him that can’t be articulated in words. Through this we get an access to his inner world, his challenges and strengths, and how he perceives the world slightly differently to ‘neurotypicals’.”
Collaboration is key to Sørensen’s work, she says, whether with her subjects or counterparts/colleagues within associated disciplines. “Currently I’m focused on documenting and portraying individuals… I am interested in what dancing, body language and gestures tell about a person, so in order for that to be authentic, a scene has to be created in close collaboration with the person I’m portraying.”
“Because I work within a cross-disciplinary form (dance film) I’m always closely collaborating with composers and cinematographers,” she adds. “Usually I edit my own work, because the editing plays a major role in the choreography, but now when I’m working within a hybrid of documentary and choreography, an editor is crucial to have the two languages merge.”
What, therefore, are Sørensen’s hopes and expectations for the Berlinale Talents event? “Since I have a sort of unconventional film background, coming from dance film and in the past years moving towards documentary, I’m curious to learn from other talents and speakers who have experience with hybrid formats. What their approach is, artistic methodologies, collaborations and funding strategies, and potentially meeting future collaborators.”
“I’m hoping to leave with new ideas of how to build the coming-of-age story about Nicolaj, while staying true to my own language,” she ends.
