Modern Daydreams 4: Islands in the Sky

A collaboration with BodyVox dance company.

Director, Writer, Editor: Mitchell Rose

Choreographers: Ashley Roland, Jamey Hampton

Producers: Ashley Roland, Jamey Hampton, Mitchell Rose

Cinematographer: C.E. Courtney

Performers: Jamey Hampton and BodyVox dance company

Music: Meditation from the opera Thais, Jules Massenet

Awards Received:

– Atlanta Film Festival, First Prize
– Portland International Film Festival, First Prize
– Phoenix Film Festival, First Prize
– Savannah Film & Video Festival, First Prize
– Savannah Film & Video Festival, Best Director (festival-wide, features + shorts)
– Silver Lake Film Festival, First Prize
– Crossroads Film Festival, First Prize
– Santa Cruz Film Festival, First Prize
– “Wemmy” Pixie Award for Best Internet Series
– American Choreography Award, Best Short
– South by Southwest, Second Prize
– New Orleans Film Festival, Second Prize (festival-wide, features + shorts)
– Ojai Film Festival, Most Imaginative Use of the Film Medium
– Interfilm Berlin, Audience Award
– Independent Filmfest Osnabrueck, Short Film Audience Award

Other Festivals:

Slamdance
The Hamptons International Film Festival
Palm Springs International Short Film Festival
Hamburg Short Film Festival
Short Cuts Cologne
Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center
Taos Talking Picture Festival
Portland International Film Festival
Dance Camera West at the Getty Museum
Maryland Film Festival
Filmfest Weiterstadt
1 Reel—The Seattle Short Film Festival
Festival of Festivals
Maui International Short Film Festival
Breckenridge Festival of Film
Woodstock Film Festival
Cleveland International Film Festival
Denver International Film Festival

Permanent Collection of the Museum of Television and Radio

Press Quotes:

Modern Daydreams is a triumph in short filmmaking - nothing short of brilliant. It is quite a feat to make a work of high artistic sensibility that is still utterly entertaining and uplifting to the human spirit. Kudos to Rose on this achievement and here’s hoping we soon see more glimpses into his whimsical mind.
— FilmFinder

I admit to knowing less than nothing about dance and, until recently, not seeing a whole lot of reason to go to the trouble of acquainting myself with the state of the art. Mitchell Rose's Modern Daydreams tipped me off to what I've been missing.

A commendably inventive and conceptual crossbreeding of comedy and cutting edge dance, the work consists of four performances, three comic and one classified as dramatic, in which lead dancer Jamey Hampton succumbs in the midst of everyday situations to reveries which lure him through a personal looking glass and into progressively whimsical fantasies.

…It's the first dance performance that has ever made me laugh out loud.
— FilmThreat

In his latest work, Modern Daydreams, director Mitchell Rose masterfully balances comedy and pathos while infusing his stories with enough intelligence to keep the sweet from becoming saccharine. His soulful perspective and detailed execution make Modern Daydreams a contemporary work of art.
— The Short Skinny

The most entertaining movie in the short category came out of the "Video Visions" series. Modern Daydreams took a series of imagined dances and placed them atop cherry pickers, in rowboats, and with construction equipment. Beautifully choreographed with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Modern Daydreams is exactly what the title implies, a fun, brief escape from the norm.
— The Denver Metropolitan

Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland (performers, choreographers, co-producers) are artistic directors of the contemporary dance company BodyVox. They were original members of Momix, and in 1986 co-founded ISO Dance, for which they choreographed and danced worldwide. They have also choreographed and performed with, among others, Pilobolus Dance Theatre and Crowsnest, and have choreographed and performed in award winning music videos of Sting, Pat Metheny, Michael Jackson and David Bowie. They are recipients of an Emmy award for choreography and in 1998 co-choreographed and performed in the 1998 Academy Awards.

Director's Statement

In early 2000, Mitchell Rose received a fellowship from NIPAD, the National Initiative to Preserve America's Dance, to explore ways of filming dance, attempting to capture dance's aliveness in a two-dimensional medium. It was a joy for him to be able to revisit dance and synthesize these two loves.

The fourth episode of Modern Daydreams, Deere John, was created during that fellowship after he had been invited by Portland-based dance company BodyVox to collaborate on a film. Based on the success of Deere John, he received additional funding from NIPAD to expand on the work and create the Modern Daydreams series of four episodes—the idea being to play the pieces as a web series and bring artful yet entertaining dance to a vast new audience via the Internet.

Hitchcock said that silent films were “the purest form of cinema” and that filmmakers “should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.” Dance then is, I think, a natural language for cinema.