From the Incoming Editors

Kyra Norman, University of Falmouth
Marisa Zanotti, University of Chichester

It is with great pleasure, and many questions, that we embark on the challenge of editing The International Journal of Screendance. With IJSD’s first issue in 2010, editors Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg made a clear case for the value to artists engaging with dance and moving images practices of a publication that would interrogate and articulate “the practice in print.”¹ As editors they established many of the parameters which continue to shape the journal today: a commitment to interdisciplinarity, intellectual rigor, and the fostering of a welcoming environment where new writers enter into conversation with established thinkers, and landmark texts that have shaped our discipline(s) are re-printed alongside the testing of still-forming positions.

With volume 5 in 2015, Harmony Bench and Simon Ellis assumed the editorship, and we are grateful for, and inspired by, their diligent and creative approach to the role. In particular, we are grateful for their commitment to bringing screendance practices into dialogue with the wider world through themed issues and invited guest writers. We would also like to acknowledge their considerable work in supporting those submitting articles to the journal: through robust criticism and a nurturing generosity they have helped to foster a new generation of writers facing up to the challenges of writing in response to the spectrum of practices generated in the field.

In 2019 our experience of screen media has shifted, ‘screen space’ can now mean any number of different formats, platforms and viewer engagements, and consequently this expands the possibilities for screendance as a cultural practice, both through the affects it creates and the communities it serves. In 2018, the collective Future Mellon / Not Yet Art² and the cultural association VeNe³ launched a festival, Screendance Landscapes,⁴ that included an archival program (curated by Danza Archive ViSi⁵ and VeNe) which revealed an extraordinary cache of experimental screen dances and animations, first shown on Italy’s RAI Uno channel in the late 1980s. It is in such a combination—of artists finding ways to make and share their work, and of the discovery of archival works that cause us to rethink our own perspectives on screendance’s history and possible trajectories—that we find our inspiration as incoming editors. Undoubtedly there are many more instances across the world of radical screendance practices, communities, and archives, and we are excited to discover more. We are aware that our readership and submissions are currently drawn mainly from the UK and USA, and one of our principal concerns in taking on this editorship is to engage and reflect an international and inclusive community of readers, writers and artists. With that in mind, in our first issue as editors (Volume 11) we will invite insights into hidden legacies and how they might lead us to imagine and create screendance futures.

Biographies

Marisa Zanotti is an award-winning filmmaker who has been exploring ideas around bodies, screens and perception through analogue and digital technologies since the 1990s in different kinds of projects. Her work is informed by her background in performance, choreography, theatre and installation practices. She has a long-term collaboration with the editor Ian Ballantyne and has created screen dance projects with choreographers including Ben Wright (2012) and Lea Anderson (The Pan’s People Papers (2015), Edits Film (2014). Recent projects include the VR installation project We Are All Made of Stars, a collaboration with classical composer Matthew Whiteside, a Magnetic North commission with funding from Arts Council England. In 2018 her video projection commissioned by Whiteside for his string quartet Entangled opened the Northern Ireland Science Festival (2018) and won the Light Moves award for Innovative Use of Sound. Current research interests include the parallel development of spiritualism and technologies and embodied cognition and the role of choreographic knowledges in the development of Mixed Reality (MR) experiences. She is currently writing a monograph based on her practice-led doctoral research that explores adapting dance to screens. Marisa is a Reader in Digital Technologies and Choreography at University of Chichester.

Email: m.zanotti@chi.ac.uk
Website: www.marisazanotti.net

Kyra Norman is a choreographer and researcher working in dance, theatre and film. She approaches her work with an expansive sense of choreographic possibility, and a commitment to bringing dance into conversation with the world around us. Alongside her work as a lecturer in Dance & Choreography at Falmouth, Kyra has an ongoing artistic practice, working as a performer, choreographer and writer, and as a project manager for interdisciplinary arts events.

Email: kyra.norman@falmouth.ac.uk

References

Rosenberg, Douglas and Claudia Kappenberg. “Screendance: The Practice in Print,” The International Journal of Screendance 1 (Spring 2010): 1-4. https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v1i0.6380

Notes