In Motion and (re)Pose: A Retrospective of Dance Films by Cynthia Penter, at BAYarts

I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense.
Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.
– Herman Hesse, Demian, 1919

Cynthia Penter practices film and video production, making fine art and commercial work in Greater Cleveland for more than 40 years. She currently teaches filmmaking, photography, art history, and contemporary media at Hiram College, and Penter’s teaching history is as rich as her creative output–name an institution in the CLE area and know that she’s left a pedagogical mark there, not just teaching, but mentoring, mounting student exhibitions, and collaborating with colleagues and students alike.

Penter graduated in 1983 from Kent State University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cinematography and photography, working under her mentor, Richard Myers, the experimental filmmaker and long-time art department professor who is known for his important documentary, Confrontation at Kent State, filmed in the week following the murders of four and injuries of nine students by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970.

There was a sense that state school students (like the young soldiers drafted to Vietnam) were disposable (indeed, 10 days after the KSU murders, two students were murdered, 12 injured by the National Guard at Jackson State in Jackson, Florida). The late sixties/early seventies is an era preoccupied with the body—the birth control pill is made available in 1962, culturally ending the baby boom while inspiring the sexual revolution, Black bodies are restricted, beaten, murdered, and surveilled on American streets, schools, and businesses, and young men’s bodies are used in a confusing war in Vietnam, where soldiers and Vietnam civilians are slaughtered, the carnage screened on television in American living-rooms.

Penter initially sought to leave Kent after earning the Bachelor’s degree because she was a mother to a young son amid her coursework. “NYU’s film school faculty liked my portfolio, but there was no funding available for first-year graduate film students,” she says. “I just couldn’t get it together for tuition—much less to move myself and my child to New York.” Professor Myers invited Penter to stay at Kent and continue to work with him on the Master’s. “He said, ‘It makes sense anyway; you’re an experimental filmmaker, you’re in the right place’,” Penter remembers.

Being at Kent State when she was—feeling the aftermath of the murders and injuries brought by the National Guard, informed Penter’s work, but she also sought to transcend the violence, to celebrate and explore the essence of movement, spirituality, and the body.

In Motion and [re]Pose: A Retrospective features film stills and dance photography from across her career, and on August 29 in the auditorium at BAYarts, Penter screened ten dance films created between 1979 and 2026. The exhibition portion of the program provides viewers with the opportunity to see finely printed film stills—luminous artworks in and of themselves, with the rich colors and clean blacks-and-whites of a skilled photographer.

“Dream Dance,” the film of 1979 features a dancer traveling, sometimes flying, through multiple magical realms. Penter’s films employ new techniques and technologies and press the bounds of traditional narratives. Her experiments also treat sound as an element just as important as image, hence she her films include poetry, ambient sounds, and avant garde musical compositions.

She employs rotoscoped animation in “Dream Dance,” super-imposing drawing over the flying dancer. The illustration is seemingly done in light, creating an actively moving illustration of the dancer. In a stunning image, she flies—Superwoman-style–toward viewers on a field of purple, the color of the “third eye” chakra, flickering in line and light.

The work is utterly collaborative; Penter allows people the space to work their processes, then edits the film seamlessly, adding technological and artistic flourishes to create surreal fairy tales that allow for both beauty and ugliness, creativity and destruction, birth and death. Likewise, the music and sounds are often collaborative. “Earth Prayer” (2018), created with music by Lisa Miralia, is an example. Penter explains, “Here I combine images of varying tempos to create feelings of opposition and harmony.”

The film and exhibited images are of dancer Hope Schultz, who was filmed as stills in front of a green-screen, with images of planet earth projected over her, emphasizing —“both [the earth’s] beauty and plight… [as a way] to underscore our need to pay heed.” The mushroom cloud is a ubiquitous image in Penter’s work, unsurprisingly, as the Cold War loomed as the enormous backdrop of life through the 1980s, as Truman’s “containment policy” of 1947 was still playing out and the Vietnam War, the protests, the killings of May 4 and 14 in Kent and at Jackson State, were all consequences of this policy to keep the spread of communism via the Soviet Union “contained” to the territories it held after World War II.

Penter’s exploration of dance deepened in the summer of 1986 when she and her partner (Gordon VanMetre) lived in Geneva, Switzerland for much of that year for his graduate studies. “While Gordon was teaching, I would go to Saint Gervais to la Maison de jeune culture, where one could pay a franc a day to use the six-floor studio facilities. It was there where I met Roxanne Claire, who was there practice Butoh,” says Penter. Botoh is the dance form developed collaboratively by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in reaction to post-war shock and the western influence on Japanese dance, namely the strict, classical forms of Kabuki and Nōh theater. (See https://ums.org/2019/10/17/butoh-explained/ [accessed September 1, 2026], for a fuller explanation of Butoh.) 

Butoh would come to reflect the “motion and repose” Penter references in the title of this retrospective exhibition. “Hope [Schultz] had been dancing like this for a long time, her movement was tending toward spiritual and expressive—like that of a Butoh dancer,” says Penter, “so I already had that influence when I started working with the Birds Who Walk at Night, the local butoh group I began photographing in 2015.”

Laura Swedenborg, a Butoh dancer who found the form after practicing ballet, performs in the most stunning and fully developed of Penter’s experimental films. “Four Seasons” features Swedenborg moving through the seasons—we see her feet crunching through a field of brown leaves, for autumn, “budding” bright in fields of new green in spring, being in repose, rest, and satisfaction in summer, and withering in winter.

It is winter that is most stunning and melds the movement of the dancer with the edits of the filmmaker, the poetry of Genevieve Jencson, and the meditatively hypnotic sounds of Stacey Pickering. Swedenborg dons the white body makeup that is part of the Botoh dance aesthetic, a Victorian-esque black dress, a blue wing. She moves slowly, almost robotically, until she gives way to the ground, earth, death.

“In Botoh,” explains Swedenborg, “we slow down so much that we stop predicting where we’re going to go next. I see it as a gift to my life and dance practice; it brings stillness, meditation, and spiritual awareness.”

The form also lends itself to Penter’s editing prowess, says Swedenborg. “She was so patient as I worked through my creative process—my dance was so much longer than what was in ‘Winter’, but essence is there, spliced together so beautifully.”

Over 40 years as an artist, Penter earned numerous awards and fellowships (including two Ohio Arts Council fellowships, Ohio Arts and Humanities fellowships, and the American Film Institute Regional Media Art Fellowship, among others), but her path has been one of resilience.

“When I started out, I felt anger over the treatment of people, and as a woman filmmaker I learned how life is not fair… at that time all of the [film processing] labs were run by men, who were always calling me ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie.’” It was sexist and she explains that the men working around her were filming “serious” subjects like Cleveland industry. She recalls, “They’d kind of pat me on the head over my experimental films,” she recalls before sharing a fond memory of Ungar’s Motion Picture in Parma.

“The guys at Ungar’s were always good to me, so as a student I would hitchhike there [from Kent] and they liked me enough to give me their excess film sometimes. They shot the Cleveland Browns games and would stop filming with 100-200 feet remaining. That’s what I would get and it helped me a lot.”

There was also a time when a supervisor at an institution told her she wasn’t serious enough for advanced studies in art because she had missed class to be with her infant as he received treatment over six months for a birth defect. It was common for pregnant women and mothers to be told they weren’t serious enough for whatever was the matter at hand, even in the 1990s and beyond.

Penter pushed through decades of filmmaking, resiliently making work centered on dance performance, movement, the creative force, and spirituality. Through her career, she’s created an extended, interdisciplinary art family and at this moment in history we could all learn from her how to cultivate more love, unity, and collaboration across creative disciplines in the CLE.

In Motion and (re)Pose: A Retrospective
Dance Films by Cynthia Penter
On view through September 12
BayArts
28795 Lake Road
Bay Village, OH 44140