Body And Lens International Screen(ing) Dance Festival And Seminar 2022 1

No abstract available.

We acknowledge all the efort of many of the festivals of yester years in India, as the forerunners and pathbreakers. It has been wonderful to watch the diversity of the flms brought together to us today, I hope everyone has enjoyed these shows.
A warm welcome to all the panellists for the discussion. Today we will begin an ambitious wish towards a possible course that could emerge for dance for camera. This is a dream come true and the community that is getting together for the event and together we work from the course.
Sumedha: Extending and deepening the thoughts you share with us. Thank you, Urmimala Ma'am, for setting the right kind of tone to the Seminar. My mind wanders a lot around questions as a dancer and Screendance practitioner about the hierarchies of dance, camera, space, very strong agents of choreography. Do you like questions that a dancer would ask the camera : Dance with camera, dance for camera , dance on camera? Where does the power lie, who decides?
We have put together a number of flms for us to experience this intersectional vocabulary of choreography and flmmaking that are relatively less explored, but an emerging space of discourse in the context of India. We don't claim to be pathfnders but want to explore the excitement, the curiosity, and discovery. Micro-genres, nuances are important to understand if we would like to do this. We have curated the festival not to 'address' these issues, but we are putting a community together that can start to know, make, create and imagine new kinds of 'seeing' dance. https://www.duetwithcamera.com/blog/categories/day-1-body-and-lens-festival

Sumedha introduces Stefano Fardelli
I have the privilege of introducing, Stefano Fardelli from Italy, is a dancer, choreographer, teacher and Founder -Artistic Director of EurAsia Dance Project International Network. He teaches as a guest teacher for professional academies, companies, theaters, festivals, postgraduate programs and professional dancers in all fve continents, including The Place, London (UK).
https://www.duetwithcamera.com/post/our-animal-kingdom Question: It would be great if you could discuss the flm Animal Kingdom by Akram Khan Company and Numeridanse TV. This project was an opportunity for participants to evoke the wild things that we believe alive in all of us. We are interested in what you think of the flm and how may it become a new vision for Screendance, looking at the relationships between dance with /for/in camera.
Stefano highlights the need of diversity of aesthetic, cultures, background, age and that is demonstrated signifcantly in Animal Kingdom. The movement of seven animals, is a new way of to bring communities and bring a participatory nature of the project. He touches upon the somatic and aesthetic diference between a live piece that one sees on the camera, and dance for the camera, the latter with possibilities to play with fragmentation and proximity. For the pedagogy of dance, he suggests that a dancer needs a space for professionalisation of the camera. Learning process behind the camera matters, because light, camera quality and proximity matters. "Everything has a career, a specifc training and learning. "The camera is seeing many things that are almost like imagination to the flm, the feeling after the show, memory and the camera." he adds. https://www.duetwithcamera.com/panelist?pgid=kq9fzh8a-f69d4c8b-6b39-4bdc-8142-a7ac78b55791 Introducing The Dotted Bodies by two emerging artists and art makers Prakriti Sharda and Sagarika Debnath who asks a provocative question: What happens when an enthusiastic philosophy major and a bored engineering graduate meet? An accidental flm.
On a wintry afternoon, two women reminisce about their college's annual production piece over a telephone call. They recall how they slowly lost control over their own bodies while performing a piece on the seven sins, supported by a dimly lit stage and blasting speakers. Four long summers have come and gone since the event and yet, those eleven dancers continue to safeguard the melancholy and desolation derived from a stage far, far away from their homes. With a cacophonous doom lingering beneath their movements, the dancers re-enact their rehearsals from that summer evening. The call traces the journey behind the survival instinct of a dancer when the curtains, lights and stage morph into an echo, synonymous to the seven deadly sins.
What do you think happens when a stage performance is restaged through the camera and for the camera? Sumedha: New layers are added to the way it can start making new meanings and trigger diferent ways of creating additional imaginative paths for the audience. Because it is no longer just the performance, but all the new nuances the images, the camera and the lighting, the mirrors can create? This flm invites a certain kind of gaze to see text, intimacy, vulnerability. Mirrors play a signifcant role in evoking that intimacy that is feminine. A discussion about light, editing, text, intimacy, vulnerability, inviting the gaze, towards a space that, using mirrors evokes intimacy... https://www.duetwithcamera.com/post/dotted-bodies Urmimala: The flm explores the moment of imaginative intersection of two seventeenth century classical artistic tradition-Shakespearean tragedy and South Indian dance form-Kathakali.
A warm welcome to Dr. Ashish Avikunthak who is amongst us today. He is a flmmaker and a cultural anthropologist. Named Future Greats 2014 by Art Review, he has been making flms for more than 25 years. His flms have been part many national and international events. He has a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University and has earlier taught at Yale University. He is now an Associate Professor in Film/Media at Harrington School of Communication, University of Rhode Island 2. In Screendance teaching, how do you think non-narrative storytelling plays a role in re-imagining dance and flm practice. As an educator yourself, please share an example of a course topic you teach.
Ashish Avikunthak shares about the approach of Dancing Othello to be a self-refexive critique of the postcolonial subject to which Urmimala Sarkar adds that there is almost a self-decolonization happening with the camera. For Ashish, in his own words asserts "Screendance holds possibilities to become a discursive disjuncture, where dance is used to as a political moment".
In a course on Screendance, he envisions, on one hand, an ontology of the moving body: Deleuze, Heidegger: What does the moving body do? What does a curated/ choregraphed moving body do, and on the other hand, "the importance of dance/moving body/the performative body that is intrinsic in the prehistoric Indian architecture". Lastly, he anticipates, that there will be a discursive friction between the western theoretical framework of the ontology of the body and the Indian thinking of the performative body.
Urmimala: Thank you for your talk and it was lovely to hear from you. https://www.duetwithcamera.com/panelist?pgid=kq9fzh8a-8226001b-2901-4436-859a-9acefe104584 Introducing Douglas Rosenberg Sumedha: I still remember the day I sat in the library reading his book on Inscribing the ephemeral image, and fnished it in a night, sleeping in the library itself, resonating deeply with it.
Douglas Rosenberg (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) is a Professor in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an artist and a theorist working with performance, video and installation whose work has been exhibited internationally for over 30 years.

Film: Empir by Giaa Singh Arora
Introduction: Empire has a dream-like abstract narrative in which a young woman goes on a strange journey encountering herself and her own struggles.
Gia Singh Arora is a flmmaker, performer, and dancer. Abhyas Somatics forms the base of her artistic intuitions and impulses. Her practice freely traverses between the Indian classical form, Odissi, and performance art. Question: As a Screendance theorist and artist, what do you see as the vision and critique of pedagogy for Screendance? https://www.duetwithcamera.com/post/empire-2021 Douglas shares an analysis on Gia's flm.
"A woman watching herself, sitting outside of herself, projection, surveillance, the surveilling eye moves quickly in the ecological space. The knowledge of being watched to share her inner life. There is a cinematic trope, we see the subject, we see what the subject sees. Inner life of the subject we are looking at. There is a moment in the flm, the sense of the uncanny that begins to appear. The relationship with nature, the sensuality, self-nature of surrealism, reminded me of the flms of Maya Deren, Alfred Hitchock's flms that speak of male gaze, the hysteria and the horror the character is feeling. In this case the flmmaker subverts a sacred realization of the self and builds on perhaps a self-care approach." Sumedha: Thank you Douglas for sharing your viewpoints on the flm.

Urmimala introduces Rick Tjia
I now welcome Rick Tjia... Rick's early training years began with tap dancing, eventually branching out into professional studies of classical ballet, jazz, hip-hop, and contemporary dance. Rick also works closely with International Performing Arts & Theatre (I-PATH) through leading dance education in the 21st Century. He is a member of Phoenix Associates in the UK, an organization that ofers opportunities and masterclasses to students aged from 6 right through to professional dancers. Question: 1. As an educator in a Theatre based organization, what do you see as the vision and critique of pedagogy for Screendance in the 21st century? 2. Please share with us an example of a course/workshop topic you teach or include in your Choreography Online classes.
"The context is everything. All situations are not created equal. A camera is added, what am I making? Is this a flm with dance in it? Is this a dance flm? Is this a flm about dance? Very valid approaches but yet not the same thing. More than a camera zooming in and out. We are choreographing bodies that move, camera person with a camera is a body that moves. So with flm and choreographing dance, the camera is also choreographed.
"Most choreographers don't know cameras and editing. Editing afects the story afterwards. Basically, it's a re-choreography of the dance. Choreographer who does not know the video/ flm world, and so you usually have a flm director, although they may be dance fans but not necessarily know dance. Choreographers have great ideas, what we see is the idea. What is important is the develop the idea. The idea has to go somewhere, it depends on the creator, but it still needs to go somewhere. We see the idea. Dance has been around forever, flm and video been too. But we have to understand, we are taking on a whole new channel, we can't completely forget the old channels. Dance is an abstract language. Like motion, can be interpreted diferently. When we create the dance, we have to understand that it is abstract, it is very difcult to get across very precise ideas with an abstract language. When you have a specifc narrative, we use a text, we have a synopsis, so why use dance as a language?"  "Dance flmmaking is not a linear process, answering these questions can help guide. David refects upon his frst dance flm and how it was relate to just the idea of displacement, and the numbness with an urge for stability, love and home, like the song, the choreography and the space. When he is teaching "Dance, flm and culture" as an Undergraduate: culture analysis of popular dance flms in the 20 th century such as Flashdance, Black Swan, Saturday Night Fever. A cultural and aesthetic perspective of dance flm and screendance is discussed and interpreted.In these flms, it is discussed how camera movements /angles portray dominance /submission of a character. Think of machismo portrayed by John Travolta getting dressed, in posters of female celebrities, to the objectifcation and construction of the female body in Flashdance where she dances to Maniac. This perspective moves away from artistic perspective to the History of screendance and its use of theory."

Conclusion Of Day One
Urmimala: We have come to the end of the evening today, and we will be looking forward to tomorrow. Thank you for all the panellists for invaluable time, who have made this evening a grand success.

Day Two Welcome Address
Sumedha: Day One was a really enriching experience, and we are moving on to the second day. Which leads us to this event. We would like to thank all the panelists to give our valuable time. We build on what we did yesterday and continue to build om discussion. Please put your questions in the chat Urmimala: Hi everyone and thank you Sumedha. I have been given the task of creating some provocations for today's session that would like to foreground a discussion on the possible structure of a course in Screendance. In that process we have actually been very privileged to see a range of flms which excite us and our imaginations. I am going to play certain provocations/thoughts amongst you and not much take much time because your inputs are immensely important to all of us. I start by saying that that a screendance course in India maybe e envisioned to contribute to the development of the feld of screendance through practice as well as research. So, we have flm studies departments, we have flmmaking departments, screendance department doesn't have to belong to any of them or could belong to both. We do not know where to place it yet. But we do attempt to do screendance in our own ways in the dance /flm courses. So the question is large and imminent that we need some kind of pedagogical structure.
A second provocation that I would like to propose is that an important thing would be to provide possibly some ways to critically assess what it means to create image-based art today? India has gone into this selfe mode, diferent kinds of images, Image explosion is the word all around. At this point to create image-based art, thinking anew about a pedagogy.
A third one would be, because there is a history of screen in Bollywood and Tollywood, regional cinema on screen, that space if it needs to have a pedagogy. Probably, the important thing is to take dance beyond an immediate presence to spaces of representation, conversation, and spaces of multi-speciality-based exchanges in terms of generating in itself a space for dance with/for/on camera.
The course would be envisioned to test and challenge individual practices, bringing it into the contemporary critical context that does not portray a narrative through dance but becomes a way to create a n narrative in and for itself with the camera and the space.
It is a space that will be co-created hopefully but not just be the dance captured on camera. Another exciting thing could be if we can think of fuelling individual and community flmmaking into considering ways of moving beyond their comfort zones and searching for radically diferent ways of interacting with the audience and other art sectors and wider society, wider meanings and wider presences. Just creating a dance here in India, you know, something that is even part of our training, because they fnish their training and prove themselves in front of an audience through a solo show which starts the stage or proscenium career. But Dance is not just that, something that is beyond this, something that is beyond the comfort zones.
The next one that I would peg, it would be great to imagine ways to develop a confdent, articulate, independent practice, through practical experimentation, contextual research and public-facing engagements. Finally, a pedagogy in contemporary practices around screendance needs to develop a wider vison of the practice and how it relates to the contemporary world around us. It has a strong emphasis on creating a community of learning, and on learner-centred teaching through maybe seminar courses, personal tutorials, individual assignments and community ideas, interested, skills and artistic practices.
Here, I leave you all to continue this conversation. Thank you very very much for coming here. I would like to introduce our frst speaker today.

Fai Cheung
"Yesterday's flms were long, today's flms are short. We are having a diferent kind of relationship with the audience. From our part of the world, I invite you to talk about South-East Asian flms with us, to share the curatorial vision, this genre and fourishing medium.

Introducing Fai Cheung
Fai Cheung is a veteran producer, curator, executive and consultant in the arts and culture in China and Asia. He was advisor/curator for Helsinki Festival and kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels. He has produced many performances, touring, exhibitions and festivals, and top Chinese artists like Cui Jian and Lin Zhaohua.He was Editor-in-chief of CrossOver, the leading art magazine in Hong Kong. He was a pioneer of Chinese Internet (with China.com). He has published hundreds of articles as theatre and dance critic, and was co-founder/vice-chairman of International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong). He was also co-founder of Hong Kong Independent Video Award. He was a lighting designer for 12 years. Question: 1 As a theater, dance critic, and producer, what do you see as the vision and critique of pedagogy for Screendance in the 21st Century?
2 In Screendance teaching, what topic would be most important for you to delve/teach/educate upon? As a producer and curator yourself, share with us the curatorial lens that you use in your city for producing flms "When I talk about screendance, my frst question is actually not what is the dance, but what is the screen? Screen on mobile phone, flm on screen of the computer. What screen are talking about? Earlier it was the larger-than-life screen in cinema halls. VR and AI are not cinematic screens, they are creating a virtual reality and you are in it . Its 360 degree and the audience can travel and choose where to look. There is no focus to follow, not a linear narrative that I have to follow. If we put dance in such a context, it is not even future screen, it exists NOW. A lot of VR products, flms,games and documentary, fction flms are being made now and is we put dance in the interactive screen so what happens?
"We are in a new kind of visual experience will be developed very fast and maybe 20 years/50 years later it will totally replace a two dimensional or so -called 3d cinematic flm experience. Most people will experience the moving images in such a way, VR/AR/MR/XR. When we are thinking about teaching screendance/dance flm I think it is very important to look at the technology now related to the screen. Not the technology that's impacting on the dance itself, its still the physical body and movement, I don't think it will be replaced by robots.The technology is changing very fast. This screen, how we are experiencing images, moving images, how people react and interact with the moving images. I think in the teaching, we have to look flm history 120 years, but also look forward next 100 years or next 20 years. What kind of screen we will have, and how to place or interact with dance and movement in such a new environment of visual images?" Fai Cheung then refects on the flms he brought from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and USA collaborating with Korea.
https://www.duetwithcamera.com/post/face-to-face-2021 , https://www.duetwithcamera.com/post/landscape-without-horizon-2017 https://www.duetwithcamera.com/post/wang-shih-s-bed-2019 At the core of the question is what is dance? What is flm? What is dance flm? When the movement of the camera and the body is so minimal will it still be screendance/dance flm?
Fai spoke of the flm Landscape without Horizon by Jordan Fuchs and YeaJean Choi. The camera and the dancers are ONE. The camera is tied to some part of the body. We never see the camera itself, but we are very aware of the camera's presence and how it moves together with the dancers. For him, the flm was a beauti-ful and clever way to engage the audience to explore space with dancers and the camera, at the same time. Not the audience watching how the dancers or how the camera is exploring the space. We are kind of brought into the space and exploring space together with them, the dancers and the camera. It touches upon very basic question around the relationship with the audience and screendance. What do you expect the audience to? Just watch? Or how can the audience be brought into the space/virtual cinematic space?
"In Face to Face, the director of the flm Ziwei Song is a contemporary visual artist. In this project she is a movement director. She doesn't consider this as a dance flm/Screendance. She doesn't consider the movement inside, is dance. She does not care. But we don't really are dominated by the intention of the artist, from our angle. Is it dance, or just choregraphed movements? She just used the physical movement to convey the narrative, then spoken word, dramatic story but its efective. It is dance for me, it is very beautiful. If we consider this as a Screendance, then there is a conceptual problem. Is it within a dance department, is it not in the flm department? Are we talking about the form to defne a genre, or the content? There are feature flms, dramatic story. This Screendance how is it diferent from drama and music. Some basic conceptual things that we must think and discuss and debate about." (Sumedha speaks on behalf of Mary Wycherley on her flms):

Introducing Mary Wycherley
Mary Wycherley is a choreographer and director whose work spans live performance, the moving image and festival-making. Interdisciplinarity is a key feature in her work, with collaborations connecting widely across a range of artists and contexts. Her work is experienced on stage, in cinematic and exhibition contexts, with work presented and commissioned both in Ireland and internationally for venues, galleries and festivals. Mary is co-founder and artistic director of Light Moves Festival in Limerick. Her national and international teaching in dance, flm and interdisciplinary creative process spans University level, professional master class and individual mentoring contexts

The Bog and the Meadow
In the flms by Mary Wycherley there is a dialogue and connection with human, nature and environment and the camera. The gaze the body, the way it interacts with the environment. Extending the vision through the camera, how do we defne space? There is a new kind of viewing of the ecology. Kirtana spoke of the adaptability to technology and how Dance itself is an extremely fraught space especially in the Indian context. Thrilling in Screendance, is the possibility of kind of removing oneself from a Brahminical constructs. There are fewer gatekeepers, a possibility of radicalism, access, and availability, and an openness to question aesthetics of high and low art, fow of the form etc.

3-2-1
Dance in India, moving away from elitism and the encouragement is to keep experimenting. There is no proposition to formality. She feels that the screendance flms has collaborative and intersectional, democratic and emotional possibilities to experiment with.
The virtuosity of Screendance should not be hijacked. This is a moment for keeping this wide-open, non-confrontational, listen and look and seeing, and the intimacy that it allows is feminine.