REEL Art
2024-2025
Core Dance presents... REEL Art: Video Technology + Installation Art
REEL Art is a platform for original film installations - a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art - making use of the storefront windows of Core Dance’s studio building. Coupled with all aspects of the surrounding environment of the Decatur Square, passersby/the audience are affected by this ingenious visual experience. As an installation, this work is unique in its use and design for the Core Dance Studio windows.
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Films screen nightly, 7 nights each week, dusk until midnight.
Core Dance storefront windows – Square in Downtown Decatur.​
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REEL Art Artists, Nuno Veiga and Sweet Labour Collective present this season's collection of films:
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Window Series #1| February 1-28, 2025
Mugre by Nuno Veiga
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Window Series #2| March 1-31, 2025
Becoming Black Walnut Tree, Becoming Forest by Sweet Labour Art Collective
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Window Series #3| April 1-May 1, 2025
wakh^tahslu:nihe: Dressing Up the Garden by Sweet Labour Art Collective​​​​​​​​
This program is supported in part by Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. Georgia Council for the Arts also receives support from its partner agency – the National Endowment for the Arts.
REEL Art Window Series #1
February 1-28, 2025
Mugre by Nuno Veiga
"As I was sewing in my closet" Ofelia in Hamlet act 2, scene 1 by William Shakespeare | MUGRE UK 2019
Credits
Video Editing: Nuno Veiga
Choreographer:  Miguel Altunaga Verdecia.
Performers: Nancy Nerantzi e Liam Francis
Music Composition: Nuno Veiga
Voice: Kate Smith
Additional Composition: Virgilio Oliveira
Camera: Miguel Altunaga Verdecia I Poetry Film Productions
REEL Art Window Series #2
March 1-31, 2025
Becoming Black Walnut Tree by Sweet Labour Art Collective
In 2017, at the age of 47, Billy, a two-spirit visual artist and one of the originators of the Sweet Labour Arts Collective, died. He asked us to continue working with him after he was gone. In 2022, we produced a community-engaged art event inspired by Billy's prompt, a community feast, dance performance and film. The work featured footage from a site-based performance where we guided the audience through a decolonial somatic imaginary practice of becoming a walnut tree. This experience became the impetus for this short film called "Becoming Walnut Tree, Becoming Forest." The piece was inspired by the place where Billy's ashes were scattered at Oneida Nation in a grove of walnut trees.
This film embraces the idea that what you imagine your body can become to guide the viewer to become a tree and forest simultaneously. Using scientific studies on plant sentience and Oneida ways of knowing, the film invites audiences to envision themselves as a beautiful Black Walnut Tree, who are both male and female at the same time, to root into the colonial stories that have shaped them, and to envision new possible forest worlds. 
Credits
A Sweet Labour Art Collective Production
Produced by Kevin O’Connor and Ruth Douthwright 
Script: Brooke Chrisjohn, Kevin O’Connor and Linda Jantz 
Voice:  Brooke Chrisjohn 
Film Maker: Marshall Stonefish 
Dancers: Ruth Douthwright, Montana Summers, Kevin O’Connor, Linda Jantz, Brooke Chrisjohn
Composer and Musician: Wormwood, Christina Willatt and Andrew C. Wenaus 
REEL Art Window Series #3
April 1- May 1, 2025
wakh^tahslu:nihe: Dressing Up the Garden by Sweet Labour Art Collective
This film, grounded in Oneida cosmology, guides an audience through a felt sense of becoming a plant and becoming a garden at the same time. By imagining their body as corn, beans, squash, strawberries, and tobacco, a dancer roots into their plant body to discover new sense-abilities and ways of being in relation to humans and non-humans. The film challenges the Western notion of individuality and invites the viewer to consider multiple ways of perceiving, interacting, and caring for their relations. It asks how each of us might nurture the interconnected garden that we all are.
Credits
A Sweet Labour Art Collective Production
Produced by Kevin O’Connor and Ruth Douthwright 
Dancer/Choreographer: Montana Summer
Script: Brooke Chrisjohn with Montana Summers and Kevin O’Connor
Voice:  Brooke Chrisjohn 
Film Maker: Marshall Stonefish 
Composer and Musician: Brandon Valdivia 
Animation: AVA Animation & Visual Arts 
Meet REEL Art Artists: Nuno Veiga
Core Dance presents... Nuno Veiga
Nuno Veiga, born in Viseu, Portugal is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher whose practice includes sound art, acting, theater direction, video art, installations, teaching, and arts facilitation. Veiga has been working in professional arts contexts since 2001 and graduated in Theater Studies from the University of Évora in Portugal in 2006.
 
Moving to London in 2011, Veiga continued to work as an actor, audiovisual designer, and arts facilitator, collaborating with various companies and institutions, including Rambert Dance Company’s The Playground, Soho Theater, Knot Theory, Hide Tide, Spare Tire, Battersea Arts Center, Rare Salt and Edinburgh International Festival. As an arts facilitator, Veiga worked with community groups including at-risk youth, the elderly, and people with learning difficulties. As an Associate Artist at Spare Tire, Veiga developed several projects with voiceless communities.
In the last decade, Veiga has worked as a sound artist for dance, film, and installations with choreographers including Yola Pinto, Amélia Bentes, Silvia Pinto Ferreira, Romulus Neagu, Miguel Altunaga Verdecia, Jordan Bridge, Luca Bracia, Zjana Muraro, Darren Ellis, Susan Kempster, Anastasia Papaeleftheriadou, and Robert MacNeill.
Meet REEL Art Artists: Sweet Labour Art Collective
Core Dance presents... Sweet Labour Art Collective
We are from London, Ontario, and the Oneida Nation of the Thames. This collective was instigated in 2010 by Ruth Douthwright (dancer/choreographer), Kevin (dancer/choreographer), and Billy(visual artist, costume, beadwork). It keeps expanding and includes Marshall Stonefish, Linda Jantz, Montana Summers and Brooke Chrisjohn and many others. We came together through complex world-making practices that include adoption, immigration, the forced removal of the Oneida people from their territory in what is today called New York State, settler colonial practices, performance events in North America, and travel between Oneida of the Thames and the Soho neighbourhood in London Ontario. We have instigated multiple community-engaged multi-arts projects. This collective keeps growing as we work with many artists who live and work alongside the polluted Deshkan Ziibi River (renamed the Thames River). We are dancers, visual artists, language keepers, media makers, costume artists, actors, improvisers, writers,  ceramic artists, and musicians. 
This collective is a “complex we”, coming from different places, with different sense-abilities and ways of worlding. In being a complex we, the presences in this collective that interact, acknowledge the mutual excesses, sometimes incommensurable, that are part of the relating. We embrace the uncommon practices, the friction, and the creative returns of that which escapes knowing. We are interested in how improvisation scores can be a method for inviting diverse publics into a rehearsal or performance as a mode of thinking together across differences. Rehearsals allow us to find an interest in common to continue to work together without complying to sameness. We think of rehearsals as practices of infrastructure-ing new possible worlds into being.  ​​​
