Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company presents the European premiere of Framing Ménerbes: Film Screening and Reception on June 19, 2025 at 8pm at La Strada cinéma itinérant, Salle polyvalente de Ménerbes, Ménerbes, France. Thanks to the generous support of the Dora Maar Cultural Center and Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company, admission for the screening is free. For more information, visit www.eventbrite.com/e/billets-european-premiere-framing-menerbes-film-screening-and-receptio.

Join us for a special evening at the intimate La Strada cinéma itinérant for a film screening and reception celebrating the beauty of Ménerbes and the beauty of dance. Framing Ménerbes frames this stunning village, its natural beauty of far-reaching vistas, mountains, vineyards, and the light for which it is known, taken in through the prism of choreographer and dancer Daniel Gwirtzman, celebrating thirty years as a New York City artist in 2025. Daniel took each photograph and shot each frame of the film, capturing, as he has often said, the dancer who has been with him the longest, himself!

The event promises an unforgettable experience filled with cinematic delights and delicious refreshments. Don’t miss out on this unique, one-night only opportunity to discover Ménerbes through the lens of dance film!

SAYS DANIEL ABOUT FRAMING MENERBES:

“I was given a huge gift—a residency at the Dora Maar Cultural Center during the summer months–and ran with it, following the sun’s trajectory and exploiting it to shoot. Days were long because the days were long. I was up before the sun rose and after it sunk late at night. Knowing the time was limited I pushed myself to get out, into some precarious places at times, and create. Most happily, bounding into Provence with this energy and friends I had met the first time I was there in 2016, there was a level of support, which spread out within the village; sixteen participants of varying backgrounds in dance who were intrigued answered the pied piper’s call. The goal of each day was to highlight a place that could be lit by the sun. Framing Ménerbes is the result of this. As a dancer, to be in this shape at this age was a gift as well. I was pushed and I answered my own call as a choreographer. The excitement of this synergy undergirds the film.”

FLOW OF EVENING

7:30pm: Doors open. Mingle with filmmaker Daniel Gwirtzman informally.

8pm: Screening begins

9pm: Moderated Q and A with a special guest filmmaker. Followed by a wine and cheese reception.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Direction, Choreography, Filming, Editing: Daniel Gwirtzman

Cast: Daniel Gwirtzman

Supporting Cast: Philippe Anthoine, Ophélie Brisset, Mireille Cartet, Myris Mouisson, Nancie Piskor, Sven Slazenger, Susanne Turner

Original Score: Jeff Story

Lightning sometimes does strike twice. Daniel Gwirtzman has the sole distinction of being the only dance artist to receive a fellowship from the Dora Maar Cultural Center in Provence, France. In June of 2024 he received a second. Since the residency’s inception in 2006, more than 300 artists and writers have been awarded 25 National Endowment for the Arts Grants, 18 Fulbright Fellowships, 11 Rockefeller Foundation awards, 19 PEN writing awards, among many other accolades. The Center offers artists’ residencies for “individuals of exceptional vision to produce enduring works of art, literature and scholarship.”

Daniel was in residence for five weeks last June and describes this period as an unusually prolific time, living in a house Picasso acquired for his longtime muse and lover, the famed surrealist painter and photographer Dora Maar. He developed an extensive series of dance photography, all self-portraiture, filmed in situ, in beautiful Provence. The unique setting of this landscape, renowned for centuries to artists, coupled with the choreographic imprint, has yielded a unique trove of vibrant visual imagery.

This photographic imagery has been folded into the larger project he developed, a dance film titled Framing Ménerbes, which will premiere in Provence on June 19, 2025. A call for participants was circulated in the village of Ménerbes, and surrounding villages, asking not for dance experience, only interest. Sixteen people, ranging in age from 30 to 90, worked on individual projects with Daniel, not one of them a professional dancer, and some new to dance completely. Several of these encounters are part of the final film, which showcases Daniel both alone and with these inhabitants of Provence. The film will screen in New York at the Dolby Screening Room June 26, 2025.

DANIEL SHARES MORE ABOUT FRAMING MENERBES:

“It was an incredible and rare experience to live in Dora Maar’s house, a house that has never been made public or turned into a museum. Rather, it continues to function as a site for the contemplation and production of art. The studio I was given was Dora’s actual bedroom. Looking out the windows each day from this space, situated at the top of the village’s ridge, there was a profound mixture of emotions, taking in the unfathomable beauty of the valley and thinking about the depression she fell into and how damaged she was by the break-up of her relationship with Picasso. I considered how for her the Maison was a golden prison. These opposing themes of being within and without, beauty and despair, freedom and containment informed the research of the film, with its use of windows as a motif. At the end of the day how we frame anything is how we see it. The long summer days were bookended by the best lighting available. I have rarely been this energized or inspired, chasing the sun from before its rise, and finishing the last shoot each day with its setting, exhausted, and eager to wake up the next morning and begin again. Framing Ménerbes captures this compulsive impulse to create, which I was able to spread to the village, earning the nickname, jokingly, by residents as the ‘Mayor of Ménerbes.’”

About Daniel Gwirtzman

Daniel Gwirtzman celebrates thirty years as an NYC company director and choreographer. Since co-founding Artichoke Dance Company in 1995, “a welcome addition to the New York Dance scene” (The New York Times), he has choreographed and performed without pause. Reviews from Artichoke’s debut concert earned him comparisons to Mark Morris, by Elizabeth Zimmer in The Village Voice, whose company he toured internationally with over several years as a guest.

An artist/scholar, Daniel Gwirtzman is deeply immersed in multiple arenas: as a producer, dancer, educator, and filmmaker, known for his blend of innovative and charismatic work. Collaborations blend genres and disciplines, take risks, involve community, promote optimism, and celebrate individuality and humanity. The New Yorker and The Village Voice describe him as “a choreographer of high spirits and skill,” and “an abundantly inventive artist with a subtle defiance of gender roles.” The New York Times writes “Mr. Gwirtzman does know that in dance less can be more. He can evoke strong feelings with a few gestures.” He has been awarded commissions, residencies and fellowships nationally and abroad. He is a professor at Ithaca College’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance and contributes nationally to the dance education field through his service as a Board Member of the National Dance Education Organization and as Chair of the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance Alumni Board, his alma mater.

About Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company

Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company, known for its optimistic ethos, was formed in 1998. Since its inception, it has demonstrated a commitment to education operating with the philosophy and programming that everyone can join the dance. Incorporating dance and story into the film medium has been a consistent practice along with creating original programming for the stage. His repertory has earned praise for its humor, musicality, stylistic diversity, and accessibility. The Company’s acclaimed creationDance With Us, a free online educational resource, received leadership support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and is designed to demystify choreography and increase comfort viewing and speaking about dance. The digital resource showcases the Company’s decade-long practice working in the dance for camera genre. Lincoln Center and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presented the Company in 2023 during its 25th Anniversary season in a stand-alone program called Everybody Can Dance. In the summer of 2024 DGDC was in residence at the American Dance Festival where it developed its newest evening-length dance Flashpoint. Highlights include performances at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Kennedy Center, Battery Dance Festival, Fire Island Dance Festival, Bryant Park, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Company’s AI-themed theater/dance work e-Motion, a collaboration with playwright Saviana Stanescu, was presented April 18-20, 2025 as part of the 20th Anniversary of the La MaMa Moves Festival.

HISTORY OF MENERBES AND DORA MAAR CULTURAL CENTER

The village of Ménerbes holds the official classification as one of “the prettiest villages of France.” It is part of the regional park of the Luberon, a protected game and wildlife area covering the mountains of the Luberon range and located within Provence, or southern France. Dating back to the Paleolithic age, the village sits on a narrow spine of a hilltop. Nostradamus claimed it looked like a ship in an ocean of vineyards. In the Roman period the village was known as Minerva, after the goddess of crafts, poetry and wisdom as well as the inventor of music.

Maison Dora Maar, an 18th century town house was the property of General-Baron Robert (1772-1831), a native of Ménerbes who received numerous honors during the Napoleonic wars in Spain, and was acquired in 1944 by Dora Maar, surrealist artist and photographer. Companion and muse of Picasso from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, following their breakup Dora spent each summer in solitude in Ménerbes. After her death in 1997, an American arts patron, Nancy Brown Negley, bought and renovated the house to create a residency for writers, academics and artists.

Maar was the ideal surrealist woman: artistic, rebellious, intelligent, beautiful, sophisticated, and a little bit crazy. Before Picasso, Theodora Markovich took a scalpel to her name, instinctively knowing the importance of reinventing herself. She was determined, unafraid, and soon earned the nickname “La cabocharde” (the stubborn one). By age 27, two years before she met Picasso, Maar was a successful commercial photographer, financially independent, in a country where, as a woman, she did not have the right to vote.’

Cinéma itinérant has been an official Association since 1901. The association La Strada cinéma itinérant was created in 1990 in Lacoste. Screenings are put on in around twenty different villages in the region for art house and general public films, documentaries or heritage films in village halls or the open air with the support of the local authorities and the CNC (national cinema centre). cinemalastrada.free.fr

#