The dancer and the looking glass

The International Journal of Screendance, 2018

I t is with great pleasure that we introduce this first edition of The International Journal of Screendance, and share some thoughts about its intentions and parameters. The journal is a new, peer-reviewed publication; the first-ever scholarly journal dedicated to the growing area of the inter-disciplinary practice of screendance. It is an initiative undertaken by an international group of practitioners, researchers, and activists engaged with screendance, who wish to establish a forum for debate for all those interested in the intersection of dance and the moving image. The International Journal of Screendance is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the Parallel Press imprint and will be available in both digital (online) and printed form. The editorial board is formed from members of the International Screendance Network, based at the University of Brighton and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as scholars and artists from related fields of inquiry. Intended as an open international platform, and seeking input and participation from the larger global community, the journal seeks to foster not only a multi-cultural but also a multilingual discourse. To this aim, guest-editors from other cultural regions and adjacent fields of practice and inquiry will be invited to curate future editions of the journal. The journal will engage in rigorous critique grounded in both pre-existing and yet to be articulated methodologies from the fields of dance, performance, visual art, cinema, and media arts, drawing on their practices, technologies, theories, and philosophies, to develop and expand the scholarly debates around the practice of screendance. It will include original scholarship and historically pertinent, yet hard to find writings, as well as specially commissioned articles. Each issue will be edited around a particular set of questions that discuss and reframe current topics in the field of screendance, as a means of promoting and enriching critical dialogue. For the purposes of the journal, we have chosen to use the term screendance to broadly describe a field, while noting that there are no hard and fast criteria for a definition of screendance. Over the history of this art form, there have been a number of terms used to describe the work, often limited to an indication of materiality (e.g. Video-dance, Cinedance or Dance film). The term we have chosen articulates a common denominator between all of the above. Through this journal, we aim to reframe screendance as a form of research that examines the interrelationships of composition, choreographic language, and meanings of body, movement, space, and time; this is done in the context of contemporary cultural debates about artistic agency, practice as theory, and interdisciplinarity. Since the advent of optical media and the moving image, choreographic sensibilities, bodies in motion, and 'dance' have featured prominently within the frame. From Muybridge's motion studies to Eisenstein's groundbreaking cinematic language, via the Letters Ave Screendance Although motion-picture dance is a thriving and exciting art form, it does not garner the respect it deserves. The reasons for this are primarily institutional. It is not seen on a regular basis, but only typically in one-off festivals and single-artist shows; it has not yet had its great critical voice; and, connected to that, it has not had a platform-a periodical or a publication-upon which such a critical voice could emerge. The arrival of The International Journal of Screendance is a valuable first step in remedying these shortcomings. It will provide a regular outlet for critical discussion of the historical and contemporary works of motion-picture dance. From that discussion, critical perspectives and critical voices will arise and mature. As the discourse surrounding motion-picture dance becomes increasingly sophisticated, an informed audience will grow and the demand for venues, perhaps online, where motion-picture dance can be viewed on a regular basis will expand. And with more eyes focused upon it, motion-picture dance will begin to gain the attention and respect that it justly deserves. Thus, it is my pleasure to welcome this first issue of The International Journal of Screendance which promises to inaugurate the next stage in the development of motionpicture dance.

Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ)

This article reflects on the relationship between the dancer and the camera. It identifies a divide that commonly exists between the performing dancer and the camera operator/director in screendance-making and suggests that this divide is narrower in production works where links to the dance community exist on both sides of the lens and where production environments do not involve large teams behind the camera. This divide is examined in a historical context and changes in the dancer/camera relationship are charted with examples from the advent of film, such as Thomas Edison's Black Maria Studio productions through the choreography of Busby Berkeley in the 1930s, Maya Deren's screen dance experiments in the 1950s, Merce Cunningham in the 1970s and concluding in the present day with works by practitioners such as Katrina McPherson and Margaret Williams. Drawing on the testaments of historical observers, contemporary theorists and first-hand accounts by dancers such as Alice Barker, Gene Kelly and Cathy Nicoli, the research undertaken here suggests that the dancer/camera/director divide still persists, even in the more closely aligned groups working in smaller production environments today. However, the article identifies a number of film-makers who, with the advent of new technologies, have developed an alternative approach to filming dance that challenges those structural and hierarchical divisions.

Dancefilm, or dance on screen, has been a continuous target for dance critics since the origins of cinema due to its lack of “kinetic force”. While the medium of dance is the body, in cinema is the camera, and so it is its choreographed movements the ones we should pay attention to. Through the use of long takes, I argue, dancefilm can originate similar effects to that of a live performance. My goal in this essay, based on two case studies, Russian Ark and American Crime, is to analyze the aesthetic and thematic possibilities of sequence shots featuring dance performances.

Performance Paradigm, 2013

movement), the use and reworking of theories through which to explore those actions, and the exploration and invention of words and terms that help us understand what might be going on when people make, watch and talk about people moving-on and off the screen. Dr. Erin Brannigan, head of the dance program at the School of Arts and Media at the University of NSW, has made a name for herself as a theoretician, promoter and producer of dance on/for/in film. As a curator/director her eclectic eye ranged across this developing form throughout the first decade of this century. She exposed Australian audiences to the variety that was possible in this form under the umbrella of ReelDance, the organisation and its festival of the same name. Her book Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image continues in this instruction. Hers is a rigorous, eclectic take on the subject: a technical, historical and aesthetic exploration of the influences, creative actions, interpretation, particularities and legacies of dance on and for the screen. Her temporal reach is wide, the whole of the 20th century and into the 21st, beginning with the collaboration of dance and film in the turn of the centuries' cinematic and movement experimentation, working through the mid 20th century with Maya Deren, the Hollywood musical and the postmodern challenges of Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, and on into the contemporary film-making of artists that include Cara van Gool, Miranda Pennell and Mahalya Middlemist. The great strength of Brannigan's scholarship is that she gives no preeminence to the dancerly or the filmic in her analysis. She explores and explains the impact of particularly successful films as a gestalt, represented by her suturing of two words to name her object of study: dancefilm. She challenges habits of scholarship wherein 'a false binary setting live dance against filmed dance, participation against observation' is featured (13). Her intention is not to deny the validity of corporeal presence of the live but to consider the special case of presence in dancefilm. In so doing she feels compelled to (re)utilise words and phrases that are 'in keeping with the radical practices found across the generic breadth and historical depth of the field' (8). We are offered the umbrella term cine-choreographic, the operations of

The International Journal of Screendance, 2014

There was a time when screendance implied a dancing body. The “dance” may have taken the shape of formal vocabulary or a looser interpretation of movement as dance, but common to either approach would have been the sight of humans in motion. Certain recent screendance films, however, such as David Hinton’s <em>Birds</em> (2000), Becky Edmunds’s <em>This Place </em>(2008), and Constantini Georgescu’s <em>Spin </em>(2009) are void of human presence. Yet whilst screendance making revels in the freedom of reconceptualization and reinvention, questions arise with regard to the experience of viewing, namely: what is the “dance” in screendance now that the human body has left center stage, and do audiences have the requisite concepts to identify and appreciate works that have outgrown traditional models? This paper investigates just what is required of viewers’ perceptions that might allow them access to sc...

The International Journal of Screendance, 2018

I t is with great pleasure that we introduce this first edition of The International Journal of Screendance, and share some thoughts about its intentions and parameters. The journal is a new, peer-reviewed publication; the first-ever scholarly journal dedicated to the growing area of the inter-disciplinary practice of screendance. It is an initiative undertaken by an international group of practitioners, researchers, and activists engaged with screendance, who wish to establish a forum for debate for all those interested in the intersection of dance and the moving image. The International Journal of Screendance is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the Parallel Press imprint and will be available in both digital (online) and printed form. The editorial board is formed from members of the International Screendance Network, based at the University of Brighton and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as scholars and artists from related fields of inquiry. Intended as an open international platform, and seeking input and participation from the larger global community, the journal seeks to foster not only a multi-cultural but also a multilingual discourse. To this aim, guest-editors from other cultural regions and adjacent fields of practice and inquiry will be invited to curate future editions of the journal. The journal will engage in rigorous critique grounded in both pre-existing and yet to be articulated methodologies from the fields of dance, performance, visual art, cinema, and media arts, drawing on their practices, technologies, theories, and philosophies, to develop and expand the scholarly debates around the practice of screendance. It will include original scholarship and historically pertinent, yet hard to find writings, as well as specially commissioned articles. Each issue will be edited around a particular set of questions that discuss and reframe current topics in the field of screendance, as a means of promoting and enriching critical dialogue. For the purposes of the journal, we have chosen to use the term screendance to broadly describe a field, while noting that there are no hard and fast criteria for a definition of screendance. Over the history of this art form, there have been a number of terms used to describe the work, often limited to an indication of materiality (e.g. Video-dance, Cinedance or Dance film). The term we have chosen articulates a common denominator between all of the above. Through this journal, we aim to reframe screendance as a form of research that examines the interrelationships of composition, choreographic language, and meanings of body, movement, space, and time; this is done in the context of contemporary cultural debates about artistic agency, practice as theory, and interdisciplinarity. Since the advent of optical media and the moving image, choreographic sensibilities, bodies in motion, and 'dance' have featured prominently within the frame. From Muybridge's motion studies to Eisenstein's groundbreaking cinematic language, via the

Život umjetnosti, 2020

The paper is a case study of Jasmina Cibic's film The Pavilion (2015) in relation to the theory of screendance. The first part of the paper discusses the definitions of the term screendance by various researchers, and its position to related terms choreocinema, cine-dance, dance cinema, dance for the camera, dance on screen, dancefilm, and video dance. The second part of the paper is a close analysis of the film, synchronously focused on three key aspects: the choreography of the five female performers, the cinematic techniques, and the narration. The third part of the paper examines the role of the dancer Josephine Baker, to whom the film makes a reference. The paper concludes that the central choreography in the film is not that of the five female performers, but actually of the model of the pavilion which they animate. The choreography of the architectural model and the spatial reference to the body of Josephine Baker are as important semantic layers of the film as the choreography of the five performers. KEYWORDS screendance, dancefilm, choreography, Jasmina Cibic, architecture, space in screendance Original link to the paper: https://www.ipu.hr/content/zivot-umjetnosti/ZU_106-2020_036-051_Jankov.pdf Link to the journal issue: https://zivotumjetnosti.ipu.hr/106-2020/?fbclid=IwAR1OYKvh4CSNqSrt1pP6jWc09DFRyfLQeAsZTLHyQpYfiJr8eV1rBZYfQps

2012

This thesis explores dance on screen from the artist's point of view following the making of the video Gaia -Mysterious Rhythms (20 minutes, Betacam SP/Digital Betacam). The video and the thesis form the PhD submission. The interaction of practice and theory through a process of creative work, analysis and reflection resulted in the structuring of a model with which I claim the autonomy of dance on screen as a hybrid art form, a form which like other creative forms such as painting, sculpture or even dance, has its own particular aesthetic qualities and limits.

How can the lightweight video camera in the hands of the improvising dancer, enhance compositional choices in moment-to-moment or retrospective decision-making in studio? I propose that the camera in the hands of the dancer moving and passing the camera between dancing subjects/objects is a form of improvisational investigation. I refer to this dyadic approach as camera-dancer, distinct from the tradition of the camera as archival instrument, in multimedia or interactive performance. The camera-dancer as instigator/provocateur opens perspectives towards composition otherwise not considered. In this paper I highlight approaches that moving image pioneers Maya Deren and Dziga Vertov held towards the camera and how this has informed studio improvisations myself and dance collaborators apply. Perhaps it is how we as dancing operators react to moments before, discoveries in the moment, a retrospective 'camera consciousness,' that enhances compositional openings as a form of camera dramaturgy.