A Report on the Screendance Symposium

No abstract availableThis report was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 2 (2012), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.

She argued that since the mid-seventies appearances and behaviour are more and more geared towards screen performance and that this in turn affects contemporary choreographic and cinematographic processes. Her insightful readings offered delegates tools for reading and responding to a range of work that had not previously been debated within the context of screendance. As independent curator and writer Helena Blaker commented, Catherine Wood was using the opportunity of this forum to "test" her ideas about performance (as now always an internal image, in a highly mediated context); and to explore this as an alternative critical frame for the work of visual artists whose projects she had previously seen in a different light. For Helena Blaker, this was "a good start to the day with a new theoretical position that was in the process of being tested, specifically for this context and because of the provocations (towards a new viewpoint) created by screendance. "

CW:
The now ubiquitous presence of screen-based technology opens up the capacity for a significant shift in how dance on screen can be thought about-and even dance beyond screen in everyday life.

CW:
Passages of our daily movement are constantly being captured, recorded, replayed and embedded in a whole other meta-level of choreography of moving images, which is part of the everyday fabric.

CW: A conflation of the languages of dance and film is what necessarily constitutes this new language. One is simultaneously factual and symbolic and proposes a different kind of blurring between art and life.
CW: Does screendance replace what was thought to be ordinary dance in the sixties, that is, an incorporation of another level of mediated movement into our experience of the everyday here and now? . . . I suppose I was thinking about where does screendance end and non-screendance begin and how easy is it to draw that distinction? CW: How do we reverse the terms of the all-pervasive image world and demand that it be lumpy, graspable and awkward? instead of being forced to aspire to its flatness? CW: Dara Birnbaum's work represents a key step in understanding the way that this kind of choreography of gesture via film and television, and now other new media, plays a part in how we might understand ordinary movement today.

Delegate Marina Tsartsara
Choreographer Siobhan Davies and filmmaker David Hinton shared a conversation about a forthcoming screendance collaboration, discussing their creative processes and interests in how they think they might be working together. As an established choreographer, Davies is curious about how the detail and particularity of the dancing body can move from a live space to a screen, and how that will inform and shift her thinking about dance.
Hinton showed examples of work that demonstrated a cinematic aesthetic and reflected on aesthetic differences between live and mediated work.

SD:
How can I bring this body of information into the language of film? How can we witness the shifts / the thoughtfulness of the action? DH: Is the image of the walk interesting? I have an instinct immediately to dramatize the walk . . .

SD:
And I have an immediate instinct to orchestrate the walk . . . The walk is this massive amount of information-probably about 1000 activities in the body which allow us to walk.
Miranda Pennell and Anne Cooper Albright shared reflections on established theoretical texts which have been selected by the Screendance Network as providing a potential scaffolding for thinking and writing about screendance. Pennell discussed Laura Mulvey's essay, "The Pensive Spectator, " exploring the choreographic potential of the still image to animate the inanimate and with respect to her own work.
[ 1 ] Albright sketched key ideas of Heidegger's seminal essay, "The Question Concerning Technology, " exploring the etymological root, technē, as signifying both skill and a process of revealing whilst linking technē to episteme, a way of knowing the world.
[ 2 ] Albright invited delegates to review the relation between dance techniques and media technologies, arguing that we are inevitably and irrevocably changed when "captured" and "processed" by imaging technologies and that screendance describes precisely this tension between embodiment and technology.
The presentations were followed by an Open Space debate, which was chaired by Sarah Whatley. Delegate Helena Blaker commented on the productive and political nature of the discussion. Her group explored "how far the mechanism of the screen can become a social/political catalyst for the re-envisioning of the position of the body in society. " Other groups reflected on what kind of liveness is brought about by screen performance and how mediation complicates notions of fiction and reality, documentation, authenticity and stillness within the moving image.

Delegate Elinor Cleghorn
Delegate Karen Wood (PhD candidate, researching kinaesthetic empathy and screendance audiences at the University of Manchester) noted how both speakers raised an important point in how our relationship with time is changing with digital technologies and "how this could open screendance up to creative, imaginative possibilities. " She also noted that "the practice may need to realign its current thinking, in light of new technologies, to extend further to a larger audience. " Mariana Pimentel, one of the overseas delegates from Brazil and currently working in Lisbon, Portugal, talked enthusiastically about the Symposium ad echoed a question that was raised during the Open Space discussion: "Is screendance an interdisciplinary practice, a hybrid practice or does it generate its own form and language?" "The discussion and group exercises were both effective and appropriate to the unfolding of the day. I often find such exercises ineffectual and to some degree tokenistic; however in this case they were indeed highly productive, particularly in engaging the views of the ‚Äòdance film community, ' if one were to recognise such a group. I hope this Network continues to evolve. " (Nic Sandiland, screendance artist and senior lecturer at Middlesex University) Mary Wycherley, a practitioner and lecturer in multi-disciplinary performance practice, somatics and screendance in Limerick, Ireland said that she appreciated "the weight of interest in and distinct relationship between Screendance and Video Art. " She also pointed out that delegates shared "interest in both the practical development and the theoretical frameworks involved in the process of making screen-based work" and she was "impressed by the representation of different countries" at the symposium which felt significant for the cross-fertilization in the dialogue.
After a communal dinner the day concluded with a screening, which had been curated by Professor Liz Aggiss (School of Arts and Media, University of Brighton) and Claudia Kappenberg. The screening began with a series of shorts by artists from the South East; Catherine Long, Lizzie Sykes and Becky Edmunds, in which the actual physical processes of filming and framing determine the choreography, thereby challenging traditional hierarchies of filmmaking and choreographing.
The shorts were followed by French Choreographer Jérôme Bel's epic Véronique Doisneau, a work made in 2004 during a residency at the Paris Opera. Much of Bel's oeuvre inverts hierarchies within theatrical traditions and in this work a single ballerina from a traditional corps de ballet becomes the sole star of the show, dancing excerpts of her subsidiary roles against the absence of the company and its soloists.