Brilliant short film combines Irish dance and martial arts (VIDEO)

“Indigo Grey: The Passage,” a short film inspired by a mixture of Irish dance and martial arts, will be screened by the Film Society of the Lincoln Center, New York, on February 13 as part of the Dance on Camera Festival.

Already the winner of seven international awards, “Indigo Grey” was written and produced by Garrett Coleman and Jason Oremus, founders of Brooklyn-based dance group Hammerstep.

Coleman, a two-time solo World Champion Irish dancer, and Oremus, former lead of Riverdance, founded Hammersteps in 2009 using their team’s different dancing backgrounds to establish themselves as one of the most rebellious dancing groups currently using the Irish dancing style and offering a major alternative for competitive Irish dancers who wish to turn professional.

In “Indigo Grey,” directed by filmmaker Sean Robinson and featuring the score of Amy Lee from Evanescence and Grammy-nominees Dave Eggar and Chuck Palmer, the action begins in an old warehouse when the young lead actor Aidan Lok discovers a passage into an alternate reality through an old and abandoned gas mask.

While wearing the mask, Lok meets with a group of dancers and encounters with an eerie presence that the viewer knows to have been following him since before he entered the building.

At just under seven minutes long and with no dialogue, the film explores the work of Hammerstep in combining dance forms including Irish, tap, hip hop, and African stepping. Their innovative work can be seen throughout as they reinvigorate formerly traditional and unique styles with their own rules and combine it all with modern costumes, modern imagery, and large elements of sci-fi.

“The film is about taking risks and exploring the lines between fantasy and reality, and by daring to embrace the unknown, we are empowered to experience a catharsis beyond the realm of convention,” director Robinson told Billboard.

You can experience all of Lok’s strange journey and his meeting with the unknown beings from Hammerstep here:

The short film is based on “Indigo Grey”, a live show experience from Hammerstep which is also set to appear in New York in 2016.

Tickets for the screening of “Indigo Grey” in New York were made available January 12 and can be bought here.

You can find more information on Hammerstep and their upcoming shows here.