Dance and film share an uneasy relationship with each other when it comes to primacy in the performance space. There is a long history of American Musical Theatre’s use of dance on film for industry greats such as Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley. Technology that is currently available for intermedia performance has moved beyond these early examples, and yet there is great benefit to a project that traces these steps to arrive at historical awareness of this relationship. We see in this anthology the ways in which early practitioners such as Loïe Fuller and Maya Deren began a conversation between these media that has continued to evolve and yet still retains certain valuable unanswered questions about the potential interactions of film and dance: Who is more real—the film image or the live? Can the camera dance with the dancer? Can we capture motion with words? What happens to the gaze when both live and recorded bodies fill the space? Do motion and filmed recording leave the same image traces in our memory? Is there image residue from the dancing body that can be re-enacted in our minds like a film sequence? Can you ‘zoom’ in a dance piece? How?
The authors in this collection contemplate these various questions from multiple directions. Some take a more dance historical approach. Others fix on more mechanical considerations when tackling screens and dancing bodies that share performance space. All on some level take on the difficult task of verbalizing how the live aspects of present, sweaty, energy-driven dancers might collaborate with the more staid, focused, and digitally manipulated forms of either 2D or 3D film. The camera in these interactions becomes more a partner, a disembodied portion of a multiplied self that looks back in order to reflect on motion that has come before, to mirror or double the movement in real time, or to presage movement that follows. The images we create with dancing bodies on stages or in environmental locations function differently than those brought to bear in both edited film and the more recent category of video dance. We have not dismissed the legacy left by Fred Astaire with regard to maintaining the integrity of the full dancing body, and yet, what postmillennial technology can do with these full bodies operates in a mode and at a pace somewhat unimaginable to Fred Astaire, or only in the dreams of Loïe Fuller and Maya Deren.
Screendance: A Short History
While cinema studies and dance studies have each enjoyed their own histories as separate entities, screendance or dancefilm has a far shorter historical record. This is due in part to these more historical fields and practices needing to establish clear boundaries, differentiating their theories and practices to build stability for their own independent fields. Their combination can be traced back to early experiments by, for instance, the Lumière Brothers, or Loïe Fuller, or Maya Deren. However, these examples in their own time frame were pioneers, and any theory they may have written about such a combination was sure to sound like a foreign language to either side of the divide. For the purposes of our collection, I would like to establish our dance/film perspective with discussions from Sherril Dodds, Erin Brannigan, and Douglas Rosenberg. Their publications are, in order, texts from 2001/2004, 2011, and 2012, just to give you a sense of currency. When Sherril Dodds published Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art first in 2001 and then a later version in 2004, she was in effect plotting the ground for a brand new field. The texts by other authors on similar subjects owe her a debt of gratitude for opening the door. Therefore I will begin my map of screendance theory with Sherril Dodds.
Dance on Screen: Genres and Media
Dodds warns us fairly early in her text that in theorizing dance on screen we need to keep an equal eye on both sides of this juncture. ‘There are some critics who use stage criteria to evaluate screen dance and overlook the role of the film or televisual apparatus. This is clearly a problematic mode of analysis in its partial point of view.’ 1 Let me be equally clear up front that we certainly do not mean to overlook the role of film or video in our anthology. Rather, we offer dance scholar/artists’ understanding of how film and video can supplement, optimize, and extend the boundaries of what it means to be a moving body on either stage or screen. Dodds cleverly gives dance credit where it is due to Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire: ‘In Berkeley’s work the camera is very much a participant in the dance.’ And of course, ‘The dance was of paramount importance to Astaire and for this reason he insisted on full body shots, the dancers being captured in a ‘tight frame,’ and a limited number of cuts. … The result is that the dance is seen as clearly as possible without being distorted through the filmic apparatus’ (6). In our anthology, Carol-Lynne Moore’s chapter is the one that devotes itself to Astaire’s legacy for these very reasons.
Dodds works effortlessly throughout her text to pinpoint what is meant by a ‘video dance body.’ By this phrase, I am not referring to MTV’s short history of music videos that included dancers as a way to elucidate the content of popular music. As Dodds explains,
The video dance body is a body that is technologically mediated. It is situated at an intersecting point between the medium of dance and the technology of television, and this convergence suggests that the video dance body constitutes a hybrid form. It is a technological construction that can only exist within the temporal and spatial frameworks of television (or film) and cannot exist outside this site. … In video dance, the televisual technology is inextricably linked to the dancing body in order to create dance that plays on, utilizes and is determined by the televisual apparatus. (146)
In fact, says Dodds, ‘In video dance, the camera work and the style of the edit are essential components of the dance itself’ (89). Dodds here establishes the same sort of connection between dance and film that we ourselves use in our title; dance and film are partners with an equal investment in a final product that does justice to a camera that dances and dancers who inhabit televisual space.
One of the modern age’s best film theorists is a scholar who viewed all arts as elements in an age of mechanical reproduction. Dodds calls on this scholar, Walter Benjamin, to tackle issues very much at the heart of our own discussion: what counts as real in dance and film? She writes,
Although authenticity is a particularly slippery concept in relation to dance, nostalgia for the live performance and the authenticity of a unique dancing body form the basis of some arguments that seek to criticize dance on film and television. … It is interesting that [Walter] Benjamin conceptualizes the ‘original’ in terms of uniqueness and permanence, and the ‘copy’ in terms of transience and reproducibility. In the case of dance, the live performance may be unique, but it is far from permanent, while video dance aligns itself more with permanence. … Benjamin goes on to assert that as an aura implicitly assumes an original, it is therefore always characterized by ‘distance.’ Although it may be a short time-scale, the auratic work develops a heritage from its original state through to its current existence. Benjamin suggests that, in contrast, the reproduction eliminates distance. The reproduction can be defined by its immediacy. (154)
From here, Dodds goes on to argue that, ‘although it is problematic to define live dance performance in terms of authenticity, it is nevertheless possible to acknowledge an original movement on a live body, because it undergoes a loss of aura in its reproduction’ (155). This whole dialectic sounds at times a bit like a “Who came first, the original or its reproduction?” debate, which of course exists at the same level as its chicken/egg model, and yet, such a question seems best solved by deconstructive philosophies involving the body as a cultural construct rather than a material reality. But this thinking negates the primacy of somatic experience and leaves us with a ghosted aura that infinite reproduction of the original will always strive to make concrete again. Apparently, Benjamin would like to claim the film audience as more ‘critical and receptive’ than viewers of original, auratic art, where ‘the viewer is “lured” into the auratic art work’ without much critical distance. Film, ‘he suggests, produces an autonomous spectator’ as well as ‘an ideologically motivated artificiality’ (158). So, to tally this vote, Benjamin believes that Dance = Original = Authentic = Auratically Impermanent = Distant, whereas Videodance/Dancefilm = Copy = Reproduced Permanence = Immediacy. Granted, even Dodds admits that Benjamin might be a bit outdated in his theory here, but she also warns us that video dance may be ‘closer to Benjamin’s theory on the production of a distracted, critical viewer’ and that on this point his theory continues to be on point.
In any event, ‘The centrality of the body within these discourses is extremely pertinent to video dance’s construction of a technologically mediated body,’ which perhaps suggests a continuing importance of material considerations. However, ‘A central polemic to emerge is whether the video dance body, as a technologically mediated form, may constitute a threat to the material body or signify a potential extension of its capabilities’ (161). Here, the chicken/egg, live/recorded, authentic/cyborg standoff is poised at a point of tipping scales either in the direction of cursing the techno-dance-body as cheap imposter or welcoming it as an evolutionary improvement on what humanity has thus far been physically capable of achieving. Dodds reassures us that, ‘the video dance body is not simply an electronic representation that can mutate in endless configurations. It is a material body that has flaws, quirks, strengths and limitations, but which is open to reproduction, multiplication, distortion and augmentation by the televisual technology in order to become a video dance body’ (162–3). In her version of these events, ‘If a body is technologically mediated this poses the question of whether it is the same body as the one prior to its reconstruction and where the so-called “natural body” begins and ends’ (164). And at the end of the day, ‘The “enhancing” cyborg technology is the category in which the video dance body most appropriately belongs’ (165). So, for dancers who have opted for hip and/or knee replacements, is video dance the final frontier? It can certainly become what Dodds refers to as a ‘prosthetic techno-body’ where technology acts as prosthesis to support rather than replace the dancing body. It is in this vein that Dance’s Duet with the Camera: Motion Pictures wishes to begin its dialectic. See Ruth Barnes’s chapter in our collection for a discussion on Benjamin’s notion of aura in terms of live motion capture.
Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image
Erin Brannigan states from the very beginning of her text that ‘The dance that is realized in dancefilm did not exist prior to the invention of film and needs to be considered entirely in terms of its cinematic manifestation.’ 2 This statement does not automatically rule out conversations about auratic performance. However, it does place Brannigan clearly in a regulatory position: “…we leave the ‘actual’ body and the terms relevant to such bodies behind when we consider the screened body and our experience of its ‘presence.’ …It is a body created through the cinematic machinations of light, dust, and duration” that leaves a sort of “luminous dust” (11). I wonder if this sort of dust has any relation to what Dodds refers to as the complication of videated representation that ‘gives the video dance body an additional texture, a layer of “technological signification”’ (149). In simple terms, this conflation might suggest that dance film bodies carry a light dusting of technological significance that we are still trying to decipher. After all, Brannigan argues that ‘Film theory offers approaches to the moving body and the moving image that are particularly valuable for developing discussions of dancefilm in relation to screen performance, cinematic presence and gestural articulation, categories of cinematic movement, framing and editing, spectatorship, and the historical film avant garde’ (6). Here we have the markers of presence, gesture, spectatorship, and movement that are both physically actual and cinematically framed.
Brannigan calls on pioneer Maya Deren to explain the notion of ‘screen choreographies.’ Deren’s location in the historical film avant-garde is part of what makes her ability to let film frames dance such a vital link to the dance community. In fact, ‘One of the most significant film makers, located within the avant-garde, in relation to dance on film is Maya Deren. … Deren is cited as being an innovator of “chore-cinema,” an art form in which the dance and the camera are inextricably linked’ and ‘her work is often described in terms of a dance sensibility’ (Dodds, 7). This sensibility entirely determined what Deren had her film cameras do. As Brannigan suggests:
Vertical film form is a concept developed by Deren to account for the different film structure in non-narrative films—what she calls ‘poetic film.’ Rather than progressing ‘horizontally’ with the logic of the narrative, vertical films or sequences explore the quality of moments, images, ideas, and movements outside of such imperatives. Depersonalization refers to a type of screen performance that subsumes the individual into the choreography of the film as a whole. Actors become figures across whom movement transfers as an ‘event.’ The manipulation of gestural action through stylization occurs through individual performances as well as cinematic effects—the two levels of filmic performance combining to create screen choreographies. (101)
Furthermore, ‘Deren’s repeated use of the term dancefilm’ has directly informed Brannigan’s own ‘use of the term in referring to a cinema of movement where the dance and film elements become indistinguishable’ (104). For both Deren and Brannigan, dance must meet film in the middle, using images in ways that speak both languages.
Brannigan credits anthropologist Jane Goodall for considering ‘how bodies think and how movement might be a form of thinking’ that provides us with a somatic intelligence, or a ‘term that overcomes the mind/body binary’ (188). This produces, in William McClure’s way of imagining it, a ‘body which feels where thought fails’ (cited on 189). This somatic model ‘provides a site for the playing out of… gestural exchange, from the component gestures to the affect of the gestural thrust, to our gestures of response’ (189). Brannigan summons this image as a ‘site of the affective encounter where bodies collide with bodies rather than thought, where the transcription of signifiers into the component gestures of the work of art are met by the gestures of the “living bodies” who are capable of feeling’ and forming what Jean-Francois Lyotard refers to as a “polyesthetic” site…’ (cited on 191). Brannigan goes on to explain that none other than Loïe ‘Fuller’s dancing prefigured the role of the moving body in dancefilm as that which can exceed language-based representation and deny the reduction of the body to a definable totality’ (192). In our anthology, Isabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s chapter best captures Fuller’s hide-and-seek mechanisms for the escape of the moving body’s subjectivity on film.
Rosenberg’s Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image
Douglas Rosenberg’s 2012 monograph on screen dance is to date the most concentrated and accurate assemblage of historical and theoretical explorations of dance made for film. Coming from a perspective that leans more heavily toward screen than dance, Rosenberg’s book weaves together film, dance, photography, visual arts, and performance studies to arrive at a guide that defines dance’s relationship to the camera. Although this author traces a number of pathways along various multimedia methodologies, his introduction to the inscription of hybridity between screen and dance is of most use for our anthology.
Rosenberg begins his book by detailing the relationship of camera to dancing bodies. He likens the movement of dance to camera as a process quite similar to contact improvisation—a multi-person dance practice in which partners constantly rely on each other for physical support to create and achieve their movement. At the center of this motion is of course the body:
This discussion goes on to make clear that all the names for screendance such as filmdance, cine-dance, dance for the camera, video-dance and others should be considered subcategories of this larger genre. Rosenberg is quick to point out that rather than duplicating vision per se, cameras ‘replace how we see the world with a mediated version of what we desire the world to look like’ (9).…there the camera fixes its gaze. And there the camera allows for a kind of engaged looking at the body that is unique to that device. [In fact,]… screendance speaks of the end point or the point of reception by the viewer and not of the material form of the production in the way that ‘videodance’ refers to the actual production media or method of inscription. 3
Rosenberg describes the body caught in motion by film as an ‘impossible’ body, one unencumbered by gravity or time. In relation to this body, the camera is ‘a carnivorous image-prosthetic device’ that merges the languages of dance and film as a ‘mediated duet with the body.’ As our own title for this anthology suggests, the camera itself dances with the dancer it records. Editing techniques allow the dancing image to multiply, shrink or expand, speed or slow motion, and transform backdrops. We applaud Rosenberg’s self-conscious ‘attempt to initiate a theory that defines screendance, to open screendance up to further theorization, and to filter it through a set of lenses that can provide new and renewed perspectives on the form’ and hope to add our own voices to this nascent conversation.
TAKES as Multimodal Dance
We now have the capability on film to let a dancer start in one movement or location and pass through several others sequentially. The dancing self in projected form can be multiplied, divided, enhanced, sped up or slowed down, and positioned in ways that explode the notion of traceable self. It is not unusual to see live dancers interacting with each other in the middle of a series of screens on which fragments or relics of their live performance get replayed in new relation to each other. One such performance took place from 5 to 8 January 2012 at 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich Street in NYC:
Conceived by choreographer Nichole Canuso and ...