unspooled

Hybrids: Marisa Zanotti

2011-08-13T09:48:00.000+01:00

During March 2010, I met with dance trained director Marisa Zanotti to talk about her transition from live work to screen-based practice and how her influences and experiences come together in her current work.

Chirstinn Whyte - I wanted to begin by asking about your experience of working as a female director within a fairly traditional, industry-based production model.

Marisa Zanotti - Well, I think I’ve had quite an unusual experience in that I was commissioned to direct a drama really very quickly. In fact the first proposal that I made was commissioned by BBC Scotland for Tartan Shorts. I’ve also worked with a female producer for quite a long time and I’ve worked with relatively large crews, and I think that in the culture of independent film, the dinosaur attitudes of the past are challenged and people just want to have an environment that’s conducive to making good work. The statistic that everybody always talks about - that 8 per cent of directors are now women and the rest aren’t – I think that’s really going to change with the advent of new technology, as it becomes available to everybody. I think that will remove – well I hope will remove - a lot of the barriers to women entering the industry. I always remember the story of Lynne Ramsay who wanted to be a cinematographer and was told she shouldn’t do it because the cameras were too heavy – those sorts of stories – I think that will change.

C.W. - I know that you’ve developed a number of collaborative working relationships over the last few years, with the writer David Greig and with editor Ian Ballantyne, and I wanted to ask about your role within those working partnerships.

M.Z. - Both those partnerships have evolved over a long time now. I first met David In 1998. I’d done some work on his plays and then we started collaborating together in 2000. Our roles were quite clear-cut - he was the writer and I was the director - although we had directed together, in theatre. That’s changed a lot, and for lots of reasons. I’ve come from a background of choreography where you’re sole author in many ways - recognised as sole author although your practice may not be about teaching people steps or writing steps – but in working with somebody else it’s taken a while to evolve and define how that relationship works, drafting, re-imagining, and re-editing the script. One of the reasons I really liked working with David’s writing in the theatre was it left a lot of space. Working in a screen practice where its script-led and where a lot of people need to see exactly what needs to happen it became more important to be part of the process of putting those things on a page. So now we’re writing together and that’s a really great process. It’s happened quite organically and we don’t live in the same country, so we do a lot by email where we just send things back and forward. I think we both really enjoy that process because it’s not a hothouse situation. It’s also happened practically because we both work on other things, so there’s quite an interesting thing about how something develops over time. There’s also a lot of trust - we both have the ability to tell each other when something is really crap without there being a great deal of offence and that’s a really nice thing - and we’re quite efficient. I suppose you can work faster when you know somebody very well, and when you share the same kind of interests and the same kind of languages. Ian Ballantyne comes from a fairly traditional industry background in editing, having done both online and offline work and a lot of documentary practice and so I think there’s a bit more – I wouldn’t say tension because it doesn’t really work like that - but there are more challenges of trying things out that probably won’t work. We worked together on screendance projects as well as straight drama projects so you’ve got two people who have a lot of knowledge of different kind of fields coming together and exchanging that knowledge and that’s kind of great. And it’s very much a partnership that grows - again there’s a thing about trust and there’s a thing about understanding each other - the thing that’s really great with Ian is that he’ll trust my eye, even when I’m suggesting something that isn’t the traditional way of doing it. I think I’m always going to be interested in choreographic ideas, but I really love drama, absolutely love it, more than anything I think.

C.W. – I wondered how you’ve found your own work developing in relation to that distinction between screendance and drama.

M.Z. - What I’m interested in more and more is bringing in ideas from my choreographic background of more the way I think abut space or the way I think about exploring something into a drama process - whether that’s a writing process, through thinking about landscape and the body, or whether it’s through setting up shots about how you can work choreographically in the frame - whether it’s directing actors and bringing together lots of ideas about the body, about the voice, about those kinds of things which come from live practice. I still go to the theatre a lot, and I still go to see dance a lot so I’m interested in performance in the same way that I’m interested in choreography and space – they’re sort of broad areas and they find expression now through this thing which is called drama.

C.W. - That brings me to another question that I was going to ask about your recent work Being Norwegian, which I know was developed from the bare bones of a radio play but has evolved into a highly visual and spatial engagement with the material.

M.Z. - David gave me Being Norwegian a long time ago. I read it and didn’t like it, and then I was looking for something that was feasible to make and I wanted something that already existed. It was a radio play, although it had a life as well as a stage play, so David and I worked from the radio script and then we worked from the stage script to condense it. It’s a very dialogue-led work so the challenge was making it into something visually poetic without losing the immediacy and acuteness of the dialogue, which I really like about David’s writing. It went from forty five minutes to a fifteen minute piece. I wanted to set it in a very big factory location, and then as these things go, three days before the shoot we lost the factory, so it became something much smaller that happened in someone’s house which was the original setting. This was very much a film about two people in a room, and about the effect of interiorising your emotions - something I think anybody working in film is really interested in making visible, whether that’s through mise-en-scene or whether that’s in the body of the actor. One of the things I’ve been interested in - and David’s writing has definitely been interested in - is male identity, and Scottish male identity in particular. Before we’d set it in relation to a kind of cowboy theme - not just the cowboy as being a really important icon for Glaswegian culture, but also in terms of thinking about people living on the borders of society or people living in emotional deserts. So that’s what the first short, ‘At the End of the Sentence’ was about. With Being Norwegian I think the interiority is much more about fragility and vulnerability.

C.W. – As you say, your work is rooted in this very recognisably Scottish cultural context but you’ve been based in Brighton for the last few years and I wondered how creatively significant that is for you.

M.Z. - Yes, it’s taken me seven years for me to start developing an understanding of the landscape in East Sussex and West Sussex. Because I travel from East Sussex to West Sussex every day, I began to understand what the terrain was. It’s enormously challenging for someone who’s used to mountains to move to a place which is really quite flat, or that has very gentle rolling hills. Also coming from an industrial town I suppose I’d not really understood what the industry was in Hampshire or Sussex. It never really seemed as visible, which is nonsense because it’s very visible - there’s Shoreham harbour; and factories that are never really seen because they’re hidden in this pastoral place, and then of course no factories as well, which also says something about what people do and don't do. So that aspect suddenly began to make sense as well what it is to be a person who lives surrounded by space – surrounded by flat space. So with that in mind I’ve started writing something, again with David, but very much from the point of view of a Scottish person looking at life in West Sussex and Hampshire. I suppose this idea of not understanding the landscape is about the poetic images you make - I couldn’t really find any and now I’ve found them.

C.W. - I also wanted to relate that to your background as a performer and a maker of contemporary dance, and I’d wondered how the transition had come about from that very particular tradition to working in screenbased drama.

M.Z. - I think when you work in choreography and dance you have an affinity to screen practices anyway. I think a lot of dance practitioners find that. I think a lot of film practitioners also find it in relation to dance, in relation to how time is experienced. There was that somewhere in the practice that I had as a dancer and as a choreographer. I was also just interested in the possibilities of how moving image could be incorporated into live work so I did that for a while with edited backdrops which were very, very abstract. Then I started to work in theatre as a movement director to subsidise my contemporary dance practice, and became really fascinated by actors process and by writers process. I suddenly became very interested in text and script, and was able to watch lots of people realise those scripts and watch lots of actors processes. Then David invited me to co-direct his play San Diego for the Edinburgh International Festival which was a huge baptism of fire. From that we wanted to keep working together and the opportunity to pitch for a Tartan Short came up. I hadn’t made any screen drama before and I hadn’t really directed very much drama at all before then, but it felt very natural and I think it’s enabled me to bring together everything I’ve ever done in my career into one form.

C.W. - I wondered how you were thinking about your work developing from here on.

M.Z. - I think a couple of years ago I would’ve said ‘it’ll be developing into feature length scripts’ but I think it’s important to be open in terms of how your work is created and more importantly how it’s distributed, and not decide what form something’s going to take. I could definitely see it developing into longer form, but to be honest I’m quite happy to make short form because it’s very difficult but it really works. I feel really excited just now about the possibilities that there are for anybody working and who wants to make films - if we can still call them films, I don’t know if we can any more - because there are different ways of showing your work. Its not just going to be festivals. Last year I would’ve assumed that any screen drama that I made would be shown as festival output and now I don’t really think that’s the case any more. I think the internet has of course opened up really brilliant opportunities and the possibility to engage with people in a really different way. So it could be that I’m still making shorts that go to festivals or it could be that I’m doing lots of other things as well - in fact I am doing lots of other things as well anyway. I know that the core of what I do is that I want to tell stories, and I absolutely know that for certain in a way that, whatever I make, it will always have a narrative and that’s really important to me. I feel very clear about that, and I think if you’ve had a practice that’s had a journey that’s not linear, when you find the point at which you actually find what you want to do it’s actually quite strange and wonderful.

Erin Brannigan’s Dancefilm

2011-06-14T10:36:00.000+01:00

Review in Realtime 103 of Erin Brannigan’s Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image from June 2011

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue103/10331

The evolution of the ‘A’ word: Changing notions of professional practice in avant-garde film and contemporary screendance

2010-06-27T08:51:00.004+01:00

Included in the first edition of The Screendance Journal, June 2010

The evolution of the ‘A’ word: Changing notions of professional practice in avant-garde film and contemporary screendance

‘The more one is dependent on circumstances exterior to one’s own adaptability, the more discouraging the entire effort. One is not likely to take the time to arrange the angle and framing very precisely when either the clouds are mounting rapidly from the horizon, or the ‘extras’ are becoming thoroughly tired, bored, hungry and disillusioned about the ‘glamour of film-making’. Under such pressure one hurries through, hoping that somehow it will turn out better than it does. It never does’.

Maya Deren

(in McPherson, 2005, p.158)

Time was in the world of screendance when we all knew where we were: in order to be professional, the dancers danced; the choreographers made up steps for them and the producers and directors made the decisions. Such a model is most certainly no longer the sole option on offer. In an indeterminate meshing of grey areas and interdisciplinary zones, demarcation lines have crumbled, fragmented and dissolved. Choreographic practice takes place on either side of the lens and at the keyboard and in the wider world, recessionary factors mix with new technological capabilities. Lightweight, hand held cameras liberate filming possibilities for dance-aware operators; editing software programs for domestic computers function as high-end industry standard, and rapid expansion of the specialist festival circuit provides a ready-made network of international screening outlets for often minimally funded work. Assessing this developmental arc, useful parallels can be drawn from within the traditions of filmic practice in disentangling an interrelated web of economic, operational and artistic factors.

Recent research by Patricia Zimmerman in the United States, and Ian Craven in Britain, has focussed on the historical and cultural impact of twentieth century amateur filmmaking, while artists such as United States-based academic and activist Melinda Stone are engaging directly with the community-oriented fora of camera clubs (Stone, 2003). While this model of amateur practice - undertaken as a pastime or hobby, and set apart from notions of commercial gain or career advancement - continues along firmly established lines, it can no longer be said to straightforwardly exist in opposition to a one-dimensional categorisation of ‘professional’, namely one set apart by specialist knowledge, and financially recompensed for labour. Dissolution of the professional/amateur dualism has attracted continuing reappraisal, with a highly significant strand of discourse emerging from mid-twentieth-century, North American avant-garde film. Artists including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas addressed the making practices of the amateur, with Deren noting that ‘the very classification...has an apologetic ring’ (in McPherson, 2005, p.17) and Brakhage observing that it has been ‘hatched in criticism’, acquiring the currency of insult, equating to a term like ‘Yankee’ (“Amateur - Go Home”)’ (p.144). The Deren/Brakhage appraisal can be read as a corrective: a refusal to carry the categorisation as a mark of artistic deficiency, with exemption from commercial concerns equated with enhanced levels of long-term developmental potential. Deren noted derivation from the Latin ‘amator’ or ‘lover’, as ‘one who does something for the love of the thing rather than economic reasons or necessity’ (in McPherson, 2005, p.17), and in an identification with this motivating spirit, Brakhage noted that over the course of his career, he attracted a variety of labels to describe his own role, including ‘professional’, ‘artist’ and ‘amateur’, observing that ‘of those three terms, the last one - amateur - is the one I am truly most honoured by’ (in McPherson, 2001, p. 142).

Deren’s antipathy to traditional filmmaking practice is well-recorded. Characterised in highly negative terms, she cites a ‘collective monster’ comprising ‘enormous personnel of assistant directors, cameramen, lighting men, actors and producers’ as obstructions lying in the path of the artist in the realisation of their ideas (in McPherson, 2005, p.20). Setting her own working processes entirely apart from externally-funded production models, Deren regarded the resulting operational parameters as requiring an opening up, rather than a restriction, of creative engagement specific to the medium (p.158). This entirely accords with what she characterises as the single greatest advantage of amateur status, identified as ‘freedom - both artistic and physical’ (p.17).

Brakhage also observed that ‘I have a growing conviction that something crucial to the development of the art of film will come from amateur home movie making’ (in McPherson, 2001, p.121), and the Deren/Brakhage anti-industrial stance dovetails with recent developments in the field of moving image production. Film editor Walter Murch has acknowledged the transformative potential of digital technology to mainstream filmmaking practices, observing that ‘I can see down the road it’s possible that a film crew will be a very, very small bunch of people’ (in Ondaatje, 2002, p.214). Murch has further observed that the advent of digitisation has the capacity to revolutionise the way in which all image makers are categorised, likening its development to the introduction of money within the essentially agrarian economy of the middle-ages. Murch asserts that ‘a media currency’ has the potential to ‘create a kind of “middle class” that’s neither filmmaker or consumer’ (Koppelman, 2005, p.335). For screendance artists, using professionally-aquired skills to operate outside of traditional funding contexts represents a breach in the accepted, industry-sanctioned causal link between commission and production. Exploring creative and operational territories, characterised by Murch as inhabiting ‘the wide spectrum between home movies and feature films’ (in Koppelman, 2005. p.334), artists can find themselves adrift within a hybridised limbo of looking-glass economic models, effectively making on the indefinitely-deferred payment basis of the never-never, as the work itself attains the status of proto-currency: units of credit with the potential to be redeemed within an academic research economy, or accrued as notional capital with each curated festival screening. While this model can serve those securely footed on an academic or arts-funded career ladder, many choosing alternative pathways can find themselves on the outside of a closed financial loop, requiring equally alternative solution-focussed approaches.

Feeding into a counter-cultural stew of 1960s experimental filmmaking, the Deren/Brakhage appraisal of amateur practice disseminated outwards, recognisably in the emergence of the low or zero funded independent filmmakers of the 1970s onwards. While many from this generational grouping subsequently assimilated into mainstream film production, the avant-garde filmmaking community retains a strong preoccupation with notions of amateur practice. Contemporary commentator Ed Halter has re-examined the issue noting that cultural ambivalence, characterised as a ‘simultaneous embrace and disavowal of professional status’ pulls an increasingly career-focussed artist into a Goldilocks-like consideration of an aesthetic equation in which ‘amateur = too sloppy, professional = too perfect’ (2009, p.2). Halter proposes use of the term ‘sub-amateur’ (p.3) in order to differentiate from what he sees as traditional level of non-professional filmmaking, and there can be little doubt that new thinking and terminology is required to adequately assess the breadth and complexity of contemporary creative and economic identities in the current outsourced era of portfolio careers and multi-jobbing.

Looking beyond the boundaries of roles clearly defined as ‘professional’ can be particularly problematic for dance trained artists, who have traditionally faced a range of barriers to the recognition of their skills, experience and status. However, close examination of relevant discourse reveals a through-line from the aspirational ethos of the post-war filmic avant-garde, which can be read as feeding into the high watermark of cross-disciplinary activity at the Judson Church in late 1960s New York. In Britain this lineage is traceable through the influence of New Dance of the 70s and 80s, and its legacy in the community dance movement, with each in turn calling into question the dominance of conventions often left to go unchallenged under the catch-all banner of ‘professionalism’. In particular, the latter has pioneered a model of inclusive practice fusing a concern with quality of experience and process-led creative strategising which, at its most effective, can render hierarchical impositions of professional/community demarcation artistically irrelevant. Commissioned by the Foundation for Community Dance in 2001 and directed by dance artist Rosemary Lee, the screen project Dancing Nation illustrates four case studies mapping the effects and diversity of such practice. Lee’s live dance work is strongly rooted in the notion of cross-generational, non-traditional participation, with screen works boy (1995) and Infanta (1998), co-created with Peter Anderson, constructed around the particular qualities of their respective central performers, rather than imposed as pre-determined, codified dance vocabulary to generically trained bodies.

By extension, the potential for screen based work to bypass narrowly-defined notions of virtuosity as synonymous with professionalism, has intersected with the emergence in Britain of integrated dance practice. Early examples of screendance commissioning in this field present a further problematising of attitudes to, and expectations of, work presented within a professional arena, and include Victoria Marks’ screen collaboration with CandoCo in 1993’s Inside Out, and Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie’s integrated casting for Beethoven in Love, from 1994. More recently Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes engaged with the movement worlds of sighted and visually impaired performers in 2001’s Sense8, and adults with learning difficulties in 2005’s There’s Something You Should Know . Commissioned by Channel 4 television in 2004, Lloyd Newson’s translation of his stage-based work for DV8, The Cost of Living, features physically disabled performer and CandoCo alumnus David Toole. As one sequence among a series of Newson’s loosely strung narrative episodes, the relaxed dynamic pacing and easy shifts of weight characteristic of release-based work is used to explore and celebrate Toole’s distinctive movement vocabulary of body weight supported by hands and arms. Non-naturalistic framing presents as focal point for viewing engagement, as close-up shots of ground level hands follow feet, hips and torsos, in a continuous sea of movement, entirely filling the screen space.

Brakhage observed that the term amateur was ‘most often used in criticism of the work I have done by those who don’t understand it’ (in McPherson, 2001, p.144). Tracking the often convoluted, intertwined branchings of contemporary professional identities no longer necessarily presents as a straightforward task. My own status as a screen-literate, unfunded dance artist holding a mobile phone camera undoubtedly presents a challenge to any notion of discrete categorisation, embodying a convergence of multiple genealogies often characterised as ’alternative’ or ‘independent’ in the shifting lexicon of contemporary dance/screen terminology. This hybridity translates into a mixture of highly specialist professional dance training and experience, combined with self-taught experimentation in the field of digitised moving image. Disentangling such a complex web of influence and approach requires careful consideration of a range of work recently created within the field, with professionally acquired skills and experience used to hold open a space for alternative perspectives.

Within the context of British screen culture, experimentation with longer form documentary has included work such as Patrick Keiller’s London, from 1994, and Andrew Kötting’s Gallivant, from 1996, with both playfully subverting notions of a professionally distanced, and supposedly objective stance. Shown within recent screendance festival programming, Alex Rueben's Routes, from 2007, similarly emerges explicitly from the personal preoccupations of its maker, engaged on a geographical and cultural exploration of the southern Unites Sates’ intertwined folk traditions of music and movement. The works’ improvisatory-oriented, non-linear arrangement is entirely reflective of its subject matter, while also drawing on Rueben's professional grounding in both visual art and music, highlighting a notion of choreographic screen practice as image composition, rather than straightforward translation of pre-made movement material.

Routes Alex Reuben

A particular strand of professional experience, familiar to dance artists working within community and education-based contexts, has been transferred to screen with a great measure of integrity in the work of Bristol-based Lisa May Thomas. In The Elders, from 2006, Thomas makes use of poetic documentary form, interweaving the minimalism of formalised movement content within a larger framework of additional creative elements. From the following year, Challenge 59 threads together task-generated imagery communicating the experience of creative work with primary school age children in a way rarely presented within a festival context. Brighton-based artist Becky Edmunds’ professional background in dance performance and documentation generates a subtlety of engagement with subjects, met on their own terms, with minimal imposition of assumptions or agendas. El Fuego, filmed in 2007 in the expansive landscapes of rural Argentina, sets the weather-toughened face of a gaucho in late middle-age among black-burning smoke clouds. In its interrelation of single character to highly specific environment, the work can be seen to sit within a tradition including Orkney-based independent filmmaker Margaret Tait’s Portrait of Ga, from 1952. Both works emerge from highly personalised, non-mainstream perspectives, involving a minimum of equipment and personnel. Deren observed that for filmmakers ‘the most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both’ (in McPherson, 2005, p.18). Thomas and Edmunds are dance trained artists, undertaking a long-term shift into screen based making contexts. While no doubt retaining their professional economic and operational codes, these artists’ engagement with lightweight, small scale, relatively low budget digital video production allows for a level of creative freedom within the arena of screen composition which appears close to the aspirationally-oriented model of amateur practice as outlined by Deren and Brakhage.

The Elders Lisa May Thomas

A sideways glance at parallel practices reveals that for many involved in the music industry, a recording contract is no longer sole passage to a public profile, as Facebook and MySpace bypass the gatekeepers of A&R as audience-building platforms. These developments can be seen as part of a large-scale wave of ongoing change in the processes of marketing and distribution, articulated by Chris Anderson in 2004 in a highly influential article for Wired magazine. Identifying the market potential of the remote consumer, Anderson put forward the theory that making available a greater range of options in the non-physical data space of the internet allows for a redefinition of potential audience base, noting that ‘many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artefacts of poor supply-and-demand matching’ (Anderson, 2004, p. 2). However, translation of this expanded consumer base into revenue-generation is set against the demographic backdrop of the download generation’s coming of age, with the attendant expectation that the fruit of cultural labour comes free of financial charge, and many image-makers continue to chase their own long tails through an ever-expanding series of yet-to-be-monetised online distribution niches.

Walter Murch has recounted the experience of his first day at graduate film school in the mid nineteen sixties. (in Koppelman, 2005, p.327/8). He and many of his his classmates, advised to abandon career plans for an industry in transition between the crumbling power-bases of the old studio system and the rise of television, decided instead to persevere and to experiment. Murch characterises this mind-set as ‘the freedom of all bets being off’ (p.328). It is not difficult to identify parallels between this era and the current state of digitised cultural flux. Now, as then, artists can find themselves engaging in multi-layered improvisational processes, in a constant state of adaption to rapidly changing circumstance, rather than following pre-established professional paths.

Contemporary notions of professional dance/screen practice present as as a complex series of navigational processes, requiring skilful triangulation of rapidly shifting economic, operational and artistic factors. Worldwide recession and shifts in domestic policy agendas can leave arts funding or academic research budgets vulnerable, as a globally-homogenised entertainment industry promotes overwhelmingly commercially and aspirationally-driven models of achievement and success. While an unpaid artist - albeit an amateur by default when judged on economic criteria alone - can proudly adopt the status of ‘independent’, re-examining the ideals of the mid twentieth-century filmic avant-garde can provide a range of alternative models for informed consideration, including ‘amator’ as locus of genuine creative exploration; as conscientious objector in the conflict zone of overriding commercial imperative and as representative of an ongoing lineage woven closely within the fabric of dance and screen culture. Regardless of the varying co-ordinates of individual pathways, acknowledging the egalitarian origins of ‘the amator’ has the potential to make fellow twenty-first century travellers of many.

Bibliography:

Anderson, C. 2004 The Long Tail Wired Magazine Issue 12.10

Craven, I. 2009 Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Halter, E. 2009 After the Amateur: Notes www.rhizome.org/editorial/2566 10.2.10

Ishizuka, K.L. and Zimmerman, P. 2008 Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories California

Koppelman, C. 2005 Behind The Seen Berkeley, New Riders

McPherson, B. (ed.) 2001 Essential Brakhage New York, McPherson & Company

McPherson, B. (ed.) 2005 Essential Deren New York, McPherson & Company

Ondaatje, M. 2002 The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film London, Bloomsbury

Shand, R. 2008 Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities The Moving Image - Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 2008

Stone, M. 2003 ‘If It Moves, We’ll Shoot It’ : The San Diego Amateur Movie Club Film History Vol. 15, No. 2 Indiana University Press

Zimmerman, P. 1995 Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film Indiana

Filmography:

Aggiss, L. & Cowie, B. 1994 Beethoven in Love

Edmunds, B. 2007 El Fuego

Keiller, P. 1994 London

Kötting, A. 1996 Gallivant

Lee. R. & Anderson, P. 1995 boy

Lee, R. & Anderson, P. 1998 Infanta

Lee, R. & Anderson, P. 2001 Dancing Nation Foundation for Community Dance

Marks, V. 1993 Inside Out

McPherson, K. & Fildes, S. 2001 Sense8

McPherson, K. & Fildes, S. 2005 There’s Something You Should Know

Newson, L. 2004 The Cost of Living

Reuben, A. 2007 Routes

Tait, M. 1952 Portrait of Ga

Thomas, L.M. 2006 The Elders

Thomas, L.M. 2007 Challenge 59

Moves10 - RealTime

2010-06-11T20:24:00.001+01:00

Article on Liverpool-based festival of movement on screen, April 2010.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/97/9865

Outlying Areas

2010-01-19T00:09:00.002Z

Research project undertaken during November and December 2009 at Cambridge Central Library’s Mediatheque.

Outlying Areas.

On Teaching Screendance: Two-Way Traffic and Maya Deren’s Theory of Vertical Narrative Progression

2010-01-18T23:51:00.006Z

Text of a paper presented at Exploring the The Screen as Site for Choreography, University of Bristol, in April 2009

By way of contextualisation, I’m going to talk a little about how this paper evolved, and about my own background in screendance. I studied the field for three years as part of a programme of academic research, and this involved making work, having it shown, attending festivals in Britain and elsewhere, and writing about the whole process within academic and review-based contexts. As a natural progression from all of this activity, I was asked last year to give a series of lectures as part of the Dance Performance course at Middlesex University and this gave me the opportunity to stand back, take stock and question what I wanted to present on a critical and conceptual level.

Within a professional context, opportunities to make work conforming to traditional, film and television industry-led models are scarce. However, within the sector, a range of highly screen-literate artists can be seen to adapt their creativity to developing work outside of the margins of traditional funding and production structures. Within the festival circuit, there is a sense of the genre opening out to look beyond its own borders, as categorisation and boundaries increasingly shift and blur. Reciprocity of influence - the two-way traffic of the title - is an area which has often been marginalised or overlooked, as the artform acknowledges its developmental debt to other traditions and methods of practice, but is only beginning to find a language capable of articulating the legacy that a dance trained artist brings to the creation of work for screen.

The work that I chose to present exists within the margin of overlap between choreographic orientation and aspects of screen-related history and practice. Each of the pieces charts the migration of choreographic function beyond traditional notions, widening parameters and inviting context-specific definitions, and, significantly, each fits across cracks within the arform’s categorisation modes. I specifically did not want to present the students with work conforming to an overfamilar set of screendance tropes, with pre-choreographed material translated to a screen context. This paper has developed in part from post-viewing discussions, with student views touching on a number of highly relevant issues, including the role of the Director and the process of direction; the importance of intentionality and produced an enquiry which could stand as an alternative title for this paper, ‘Who decides what’s dance?’

I also want to contextualise by talking about my own involvement within the process of writing. Screendance is a sparsely-populated community, whose members - like the inhabitants of a small island - fulfill multiple and often overlapping roles which can include maker, lecturer, spectator, researcher, workshop leader, reviewer, curator, festival or conference organiser at any given time. My own activities place me within a number of interlinked categories, often writing about the work of people who are a part of my professional world, and who I have known over long timespans. While I have no pretensions towards framing myself as a disinterested ‘outside eye’, I do like to think that I can stand sufficiently to one side to discern patterns, create groupings and add a highly-personalised commentary, as one voice and viewpoint among many, to the work I see developing around me.

As this is a paper dealing in part with narrative forms, I’m going to begin with a story. In 1953, avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren presented a paper in New York at a symposium on poetry and film. Fellow panellists included the playwright Arthur Miller and the poet Dylan Thomas. At this event, Deren put forward a model for evaluating screenbased narrative progression, contrasting a notion of horizontal movement, shifting from one action-oriented event to another, with that of vertical progress. This, she asserted, represented an associative, poetically-oriented exploration, where meanings inherent within ‘the ramifications of the moment’ were subject to in-depth examination (in Jackson in Nichols, 2001, p.64). While not initially well received, Deren’s theorising has been more recently reappraised. Annette Michelson has read Deren’s model in relation to aspects of Roman Jakobson’s writing in the field of linguistic theory (in Jackson in Nichols, 2001, p.65). Erin Brannigan has also identified parallels between Deren’s model of vertical progression and the Deleuzean notion of the time-image (Brannigan, 2002, contents/02/22/deren.htm).

Within the context of this paper, Deren’s notion is presented as central to an understanding of the work of three contemporary makers of moving image. While the work does not concern itself with the performance of codified movement content, it will be argued that dance-derived practices, mutating within context-specific forms, influence the highly personalised set of compositional strategies used by each practitioner. The work will also be located within a contemporary ecology of dance work for screen, drawing on practitioner writing in addition to a range of cultural and historical influences.

Reflecting the array of options open to contemporary practitioners, film maker Stan Brakhage has written of the shifting status and perception of his own roles within the context of film production, by stating that

I have contributed to many commercial films as ‘director’ , ‘photographer’, ‘editor’, ‘writer’, ‘actor’ even ‘grip’, etcetera, and sometimes in combination of all of these. But mostly I have worked at home and alone on films of seemingly no commercial value

(Brakhage in McPherson, 2001, p.142)

Brighton-based Marisa Zanotti’s professional history is as a performer and dance maker, currently developing screenbased work as a Director within a traditional production context. From At The End Of The Sentence , created in 2005, an initial monochromatic image of a disembodied torso foregrounds the slowed movement pathway of a whirling rope, followed by a montage sequence reducing morning-set daily preparations to a series of nine shots. As a wealth of information is contained within this sequence, it is worth examining in detail. A half-open bedroom door frames a single male character, seated on the side of a bed. Compositionally reminiscent of the work of figurative painter Edward Hopper, the angularity of the door frame is balanced by the vertical patterning of a stairway, partially visible by the outer edge of the frame. Sound intrudes on solitude, as the electronic harshness of a clock radio alarm initiates the underlying rhythmic urgency of a continuously ticking clock. A top shot of a dresser and chair discloses the trappings of an ordered masculine world: a neatly folded shirt; an arrangement of coins, keys and comb. A back view of a kitchen-set head follows, as an egg is loudly cracked, and a textual countdown begins with a minimal call of ‘fifteen minutes’. Two bathroom-set shots disclose the back of a head, the sound of water, the reflection of a face, as the countdown reaches ‘eight minutes’. A disembodied kitchen-set hand measures a serving of oats; a kettle whistles in the foreground, and a figure calls ‘five minutes’ before leaving shot. A table-top view as porridge is poured, and the count reaches ‘one minute’.

Zanotti’s directorial input can be read from a choreographic perspective in relation to the parallel processes of framing and edit. The role of the latter has been specifically addressed by Karen Pearlman in an outlining of the overlap in function between the professional roles of the dance trained artist and the film editor. Pearlman has expanded on the physiologically-oriented correspondences inherent within the editing process, which she describes as ‘tuning one’s own physical rhythms to the rhythms being perceived in the filmed material’ (undated, dancefilms.org/Abouteduaction.html, p.3). Stan Brakhage has also made reference to the process of art-making as a physiological phenomenon, asserting that an artist’s input reflects an externalisation of ‘the individual expression that can be attended by a person hearing himself sing and hearing his heart beat’ (in McPherson, 2001, p.124). As Director, Zanotti moves the viewer through the particulars of domestic habitation, touring bedroom, bathroom and kitchen in thin-sliced micro-segments as a cumulative gathering of detail, while isolated instances of gestural movement are interwoven with rhythmically precise sonic counterpoint. Information on the specifics of emotional shading is amassed at high speed, in a close-knit fusion of constituent elements, heavily weighted towards the non-verbal. Characters are glimpsed in physically fragmented, temporally isolated moments, and this compositional fluency can be attributed to Zanotti’s professional lineage, approached through the framework of a highly personalised, choreographically-derived skillset, and manifest within the arena of short film.

Fellow Brighton-based artist Becky Edmunds’ professional background lies within the fields of improvised dance and live art, with a substantial body of experience developed within the highly specialist practice of dance videography. Recent screenbased work has been created in partnership with sound artist Scott Smith and dance artist Gill Clarke, and This Place, dating from 2008, makes use of a range of readily-identifiable compositional strategies in a diffuse and non-linear exploration of location. The work begins with a minimal soundscape of sporadic, industrial noise. Set against a darkened screen, this device provides a recurring baseline of visual referencing. A contrasting white screen state, used as counterpoint, forms a basis for the appearance of flickering, architectural detail, initially disclosed in part. The viewing eye is guided through a scaffolded cross-hatching of wood and metal, while the seemingly solid man-made verticals of brick-built towers and grooved metallic tracking appear to shimmer and undulate in the camera’s gaze. The screenspace contracts to accommodate the sharp angles of signeage, and the piece ends in a shot series on the greyscaled textural detail of blocked stone.

Video artist Bill Viola has articulated the notion of embodied knowledge, deriving from professionally-related practices, stating

I first started using a video camera when I was 21. I had to think about where I was pointing it, how I was using it, what the light was, and so on. And this process was not only technical, it had a direct effect on the content of my work. Then I used that camera for twenty years, and that 21-year old part of me who was struggling with composition and lighting is now something deeper, and has migrated to my hand, so that the center (sic) of consciousness has moved from my conscious mind to my hand. My hand now ‘knows’ where to put the camera, which I do quite naturally, when I encounter a new location.

(Viola, 1998, p.272)

This sentiment is echoed by Edmunds in a description of her own practice, where she states that the decisions made, involving the siting of the camera in relation to her subjects, ‘feel instinctive, but they come from years of practising placing my body in space as a dancer’ (2006, email). This approach also strongly resonates with Brakhage’s assertion that ‘cinematic dancing might be said to occur as any filmmaker is moved to include his whole physiological awareness in any film movement’ (in McPherson, 2001, p.132). Edmunds’ camera practice provides a clear example of kinaesthetically aware engagement with the act of filming, translating into a strongly physiologically-based viewing response. Within the work, the eye is led along a trail of textural minutae and visual information is disclosed within carefully controlled increments, woven within a tightly regulated framework. Atmospheric tone is generated within an angular matrix of visual patterning, ultimately disrupted and mobilised by camera effect. Extreme selectivity of focus and distortion of scale feature as aspects of Edmunds’ compositional strategizing. Elements traceable from improvised performance and dance documentation synergistically combine, finding a fit within the screening contexts of documentary and artists film.

Brakhage has also observed that the original meaning of cinematographer is ‘writer of movement’ (2003, DVD interview), and in London-based short filmmaker Christopher Steel’s Welcome to Southside from 2008, camera journey forms the basis of the work. Multiple re-exposures of footage shot from a moving vehicle interior creates an abstracted cityscape of night-lit neon. From opening darkness, white flecks converge into the overlaid markings of a central circular structure, gradually cohering and then dissipating. The outline of bridge supports festoon the screen as curving strings of brightness, and confectionary-coloured specks cloud like fireflies against the steady peripheral motion of passing lights. Shown in silence, and as a continuous, unedited take, the visuality of the work is heightened and removed from the constraints of linear time, with a quality of atmospheric otherness, reminiscent of the photographic travel studies of Oscar Marzaroli, blurring specificity of detail into an etheric residue of city-based transience.

Brakhage has written with specific reference to the movement of the natural elements in Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera from 1945, asserting that,

when she pans across the trees in the beginning, they ‘strobe’ because she was shooting at the wrong speed. The effect is magical. They are in a state of dance.

(Brakhage, 1989, p.98)

Steel’s use of camera motion transforms the non-natural aspects of his surroundings, with composite elements arguably attaining Brakhage’s notion of ‘a state of dance’. The constant motion of passage locates the viewing eye within a kinaesthetically-oriented experience, generating an internalised rhythmic response to the out-of-time negotiation of external landscape. While not located as a practitioner within a dance tradition, Steel’s work can clearly be contextualised in relation to the filmic avant-garde, where the legacy of makers such as Norman McLaren and Len Lye problematises traditional genre demarcation. Generally shown within the remit of experimental short film programming, Steel’s work crossed a contemporary threshold of categorisation by recent inclusion within the screendance festival circuit.

When viewed from within the parameters of Deren’s notion of vertical progression, all three works concern themselves with the ‘ramifications of the moment’, layered into a poetically-oriented mesh of image-states, with a sense of linear time distorted, truncated or collapsed. Zanotti’s opening montage makes accretive use of isolated detail as a means of building character and context, while Edmunds’ selective disclosure of visual patterning constructs over time an immersive viewing environment, and Steel’s conceptualisation of cityscape as overlaid amalgam transcends the particulars of location, transforming everyday experience into auric abstraction. Deren’s model of non-linear verticality can be viewed as a key characteristic of the territorial overlap between screendance and experimental film practice, and can also provide a theoretical grounding for aspects of compositional arrangement often favoured by dance trained artists. In this instance, Deren’s model also provides a unifying ground of approach to a range of work, which, when viewed together, can be seen to represent, in diversity of conceptualisation and execution, a sampling of options available to contemporary screenbased artists.

The transformation of that climate within recent memory is starkly foregrounded by referencing the limited pool of specialist writing on screendance. In 1993, the then Arts Council of Great Britain published an anthology, edited by Stephanie Jordan and Dave Allen, on the emergent genre of dance work created for screen. Reflecting a period where four terrestrial television channels were dominant, the text evokes a world where dance and screen culture represented two entirely separate fields of specialist knowledge and working practice, providing a rationale for the title of the book, Parallel Lines (p.vi). Sixteen years on from publication, the cultural and creative landscape surrounding screendance is entirely unrecognisable. A show of hands from the dance students at Middlesex revealed a daily engagement with mobile technologies, social networking sites and internet-based moving image, providing a snapshot of the ubiquity of interaction with screenbased culture for this cross-section of twenty first century youth. Many dance trained artists regard working with the software programs iMovie or Final Cut Pro as natural extensions of a computer-based culture they have grown to take for granted, rather than excursions into a realm of privileged technical expertise. Ripples from the waves of cultural change can be identified in convergence points across a range of contemporary artforms, including dance, film and video, requiring a redefinition of traditional practices in the process of adaption to changing circumstance and possibility. Artists are operating within an irrevocably altered cultural context, and Betty Redfern has noted the correspondence between artistic process and environmental influence, asserting that ‘the work of even the most highly creative artist grows out of the habits and thoughts and feelings integral to the society to which he belongs’ (1983, p.38).

A brief historical exploration reveals parallels within the pace of twenty-first century technical development and the industrial innovations, arguably facilitating the emergence of moving image, of the nineteenth. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written of the phenomenon of ‘panoramic seeing’, which, he asserts, emerged during the nineteenth century as a direct consequence of the new social phenomenon of the railway journey. Andrew Pickering has commented on this railway-mediated characterisation of visual perception by observing that, in contrast to previously available modes of transport, such as walking or carriage travel, ‘the immediate foreground vanishes...and the background is seen synthetically...It is as though the landscape appears as a movie projected on to the screen of the window’ (Pickering in Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny, 2001, p.67/8). Against such a backdrop of rapid industrial development, introducing railway travel and telegraphic communication to the American west, Eadweard Muybridge famously produced a series of photographs in California in 1872 revealing the stride-action of a race-horse. Without Muybridge’s technological innovation in relation to the mechanics of shutter-release, precise details of high-speed movement had previously been imperceptible to the human eye, and Rebecca Solnit has commented that this experimentation began a process ’revealing the secret world of motion’ (Solnit, 2003, p.83). Dance filmmaker Douglas Rosenberg has also commented that Muybridge’s motion studies ‘anticipated what we have come to call video dance by some one hundred years’ (undated, www.dvpg.net/essays.html.p.9).

Within a contemporary context, Rosenberg has also argued for the need for a radical rethinking of traditional screen-related choreographic process, observing that

in order for the video or cine-dance to live, its original (the ‘choreography’) must be effaced or sacrificed in favour of a new creature.

(Rosenberg, undated, www.dvpg.net/essays.html, p.10/11)

It can be argued that choreographic practice for screen has, in certain instances, reached a point of sufficient maturity to bypass Rosenberg’s notion of original choreographic content altogether, engaging directly with screen-related processes in ways which are wholly inseparable from context, and that this evolutionary progression is currently manifesting in a diverse array of genre-crossing creatures as artists and viewers, not confined within the linearity of parallel tracks, but inhabiting areas of non-linear, multidirectional intersection.

The task of articulating the kinaesthetic engagement of artists with the processes of filming and editing, and of how that engagement can transmit to viewers, appears entirely appropriate to makers of, and commentators on, the genre of screendance. Read in this way, the ‘state of dance’, as explored within twentieth-century avant-garde film by Deren, Brakhage, McLaren, can provide both raw material and method of approach relevant to contemporary screenbased practitioners such as Zanotti, Edmunds and Steel, mediated through a range of twenty-first century production options.

I’m going to leave the last word to the students, and to providing at least in part an answer to their question which began the paper. Reading a screenbased image, including the procedures involved in its construction and it’s many possible interpretations, from a choreographic perspective requires an underlying affirmation of the validity of such an undertaking. This event seems to me to highlight the timeliness and importance of this ongoing process, with all of us here to engage for ourselves, both individually and collectively, in the ongoing task of deciding what can be read as dance within a screen context, and how that task might be achieved.

Bibliography:

Brakhage, S. 1989 Film at Wit’s End: Essays on American Independent Filmmakers Edinburgh, Polygon

Brannigan, E. undated Maya Deren, Dance, and Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Time

www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/22/deren.html - accessed 13.11.06

Jordan, S. and Allen, D. (eds.) 1993 Parallel Lines: Media Representation of Dance

London, The Arts Council of Great Britain

McPherson, B. (ed.) 2001 Essential Brakhage New York, McPherson & Company

Nichols, B. (ed.) 2001 Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde Berkeley, University of California Press

Pearlman, K. undated Editing Rhythms

www.dancefilms.org/Abouteducation.html - accessed - 21.2.07

Redfern, B. 1983, Dance, Art & Aesthetics London Dance Books Ltd

Rosenberg, D. undated Video Space: A Site for Choreography

www.dvpg.net/essays.html - accessed - 19.11.06

Schatzki, C, Knorr Cetina, K, von Savigny, E. (eds.) 2001 The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory London, Routledge

Solnit, R. 2003 Motion Studies London, Bloomsbury

Viola, B. 1998 Reasons for Knocking At An Empty House Cambridge, MIT Press

Videography:

Brakhage, S. 2003 by Brakhage: an anthology The Criterion Collection

Edmunds, B. 2008 This Place Field Production

Steel, C. 2008 Welcome to Southside

Zanotti, M. (Dir.) 2005 At The End of The Sentence Oxygen Films

Hybrids: Becky Edmunds - Filmwaves

2009-12-12T11:36:00.003Z

Interview with dance-trained screen artist Becky Edmunds for Filmwaves.

www.filmwaves.co.uk

www.beckyedmunds.com

Close Readings

2009-12-06T12:50:00.002Z

Writing originally generated during 2005/6 by participation in a Film Studies course run by University of Cambridge Board of Continuing Education and Cambridge Arts Picture House. Focussing in turn on the work of filmmakers Geoffrey Jones, Lynne Ramsay, Carlos Saura and choreographer/director Wim Vandekeybus, each text was revised during October 2009.

Geoffrey Jones:

British short filmmaker Geoffrey Jones found employment during the 1960s with the Shell Film Unit, and British Transport Films, locating much of his output within the tradition of the British Industrial short. Jones’ distinctive editing style relates to the rhythmic interaction of elements as screen composition. In Shell Spirit , created as an advert for the company in 1962, a large amount of visual information is compressed within a two minute timeframe, tightly edited to the accompaniment of a jauntily melodic penny whistle soundtrack.

The work begins and ends with an opening, and subsequently closing, human eye. Juxtaposed with the Shell logo, the image conflates both the start and end of the viewing experience with the company’s visual branding. The eye’s use as a framing device lends a sense of distance, presenting a window-on-the-world exoticism as found in children’s T.V. programming, documentary and public information film of the period.

A journey begins with the purchase of petrol, and continues through cityscape and country-set locations before arriving at a seaside location. Jones manages to convey large amounts of visual information with great economy of means, as close-ups of a petrol cap’s removal, and insertion of a syphon establish the journey’s garage forecourt starting point. No driver is ever seen, and visual detail is presented at almost subliminal level, as rows of eyes on an advertising billboard flash past. Car wheels, bicycles and white lines of road marking are framed from vehicle level, as the overhead patternings of telegraph wires blur into passing abstraction. The serial passage of picket fence posts and newly-ploughed furrows become visual counterpoints to specific musical content. A woman turns her head to one side, dark hair disarrayed in slipstream. A group of pigs turn to run, apparently in fright, and the silhouette of a galloping horse is superimposed against country road, as though travelling alongside, before veering off on an adjacent path. Birds in flight and the spores from a dandelion clock mark the journey’s country-set passage, while a gull and breaking waves herald an end point by the sea. Throughout, visual imagery equates the purchase of Shell’s product with ease of movement and the carefree liberty of unfettered motor travel. Horse, birds, waves and an open sky locate the car and its driver within the freedom of the natural world, as a fleeting shot of a roadside cottage presents an image of solidity and immovability, left behind for dust.

Jones, G. (dir.) 2004 Geoffrey Jones: The Rhythm of Film BFI

Lynne Ramsay:

After initial study of photography, Lynne Ramsay trained as a cinematographer, and her directorial output can be read as the weaving together of often visually-led images and episodes.

Ramsay begins her debut feature Ratcatcher (1999) with a striking image, as a head and torso twist, close-up and in slow-motion, shrouded in a nylon curtain. A muted soundtrack of childhood shouts is abruptly broken by a blow to the head, restoring an external world of normalised sound and parental discipline, as the curtains slowly unwind.

Windows recur as a framing image. From the upper deck of a bus, the film’s central character, James, watches the landscape shift from the oppressive, rubbish-strewn streets of his urban neighbourhood to an expansive countryside location. Encountering a golden-lit view of a field from an uncompleted kitchen window, lack of glass allows him to sit within the frame, before passing through as though into another dimension of being. Reflections recur, distorted or clear, within the surface of the canal.

Throughout, Ramsay uses wordless images and episodes to illustrate emotional states. James escapes from the pressures of family by running along the canalside at dusk. Filmed from the opposite bank, his reflection is visible in the water’s surface, with laboured breath amplified, as though heard close by. In the wake of attack, James’ father and mother slow dance in their living room, entwined against a darkened background, visible from the waist up. The couple’s close bodily contact as they slowly revolve presents an image of wholeness and tenderness, temporarily resolving gender-based, societal and inter-familial conflicts. Escaping his father’s anger, James externalises his own by attacking the rats infesting black rubbish bags, his movements blurred, filmed in jarring close-up with dislocatingly rapid cutting rate.

Reflected in the distorting oval of a bus’ stairway mirror, James observes his surroundings change as a journey progresses. Partial and constricted camera angles give way to a fuller framing choice, exposing a vista of open countryside from the bus’s upper deck. James encounters the exterior of a partially-completed housing project, jumping into a pile of sand, and making use of an adjacent spade. In the house’s interior, after lying inside a plastic-covered bath, and urinating into an as yet unplumbed toilet, he encounters the kitchen-set, window framed view of a golden field, and, once inside, is filmed in a montage of running, jumping, rolling and lying. His head, briefly visible against the shoulder-high crop, disappears from view, to be replaced by feet in the air, followed by a shot in which he stands upright, surveying the landscape.

This physical and emotional terrain is revisited at the film’s end, as a procession of figures appears over the horizon line, through the field and towards the house. Led by James’ father and followed by his mother and younger sister, reflected in the mirror she carries, the processional party is framed through the rectangular shape of the kitchen window. The formalised quality of painterly composition and strong golden light adds to an idealised sense of beauty, bookended by footage of James’ body floating in slowed underwater motion.

Ramsay’s second full-length film, Morvern Callar (2003), is an adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel, with narrative’s requirements allowing Ramsay to contrast the enclosed, winter-set landscape of a small port town in the north of Scotland with sundrenched expanses of rural Spain.

Use of dialogue-free imagery surfaces in a repeating engagement with intermittent light source. Highly selective framing for the film’s opening sequence provides an ambiguous viewing perspective, with Samantha Morton’s face shown in close up, in proximity to another, partially seen, figure. Further visual information is provided gradually, ending in a shot revealing Morton’s body lying adjacent to another on a living room floor, lit by the rhythmic pulsing of Christmas tree lights. Morton, in the title role, later inhabits the night-time darkness of the shore’s edge, as a lone fisherman, passing in his boat, illuminates her presence by torchlight. Circularly framed and surrounded by blackness, Morton lifts her skirt to her waist, maintaining visual engagement with the camera/viewer, by staring into the light. Within a club setting, an at times over-saturated red or blue flash fleetingly discloses faces, hands and arms within the surrounding darkness, in addition to Morton’s face, hair pulled back exaggerating eye sockets and cheek-bones to otherworldly effect.

Ramsay also conveys Morton’s attempts to overcome a sense of her character’s alienation from environment by connecting through touch. In the film’s opening sequence, she traces the length of her dead boyfriend’s arm, and after burying his body, appears to find a moment of release in the natural surroundings of moorland landscape, shown in a montage of running and laughing, accompanied by the sound of her own breath. Using one hand to trace the pattern of a branch to its tip, both are then immersed in water, observing the insect life in the surrounding mud. Later sitting against a tree in the Spanish countryside, an insect climbs over a hand, establishing connection to the life of the earth.

The absence of any obvious sound in the film’s opening sequence provokes an unsettling viewing experience, akin to the holding of breath. The muted noise of computer screen scrolling, where the instruction ‘Read Me’ resonates with the start of an Alice-like journey, emphasises an environment of extreme quietness. Later, the sounds of wrapping paper; the snap of jacket fasteners and the clicking of a cigarette lighter appear to take on heightened levels, while outside, the sound of a passing train and a ringing phone evoke a jarring sense of intrusion. Morton’s walkman provides an insulating and private soundtrack to her own experience. Entering her supermarket workplace becomes a music video-like marriage of aural and visual imagery, as the sweep of a motorised buggy coincides with a lush string arrangement, and a camera pans along the butcher’s counter as staff wave in greeting to the camera. Morton is filmed front-on in tight facial close-up in her progression through the store, before her walkman is removed and placed in her locker, heralding a return to working life.

Ramsay, L. (dir.) 1999 Ratcatcher Holy Cow Productions

Ramsay, L. (dir.) 2003 Morvern Callar Momentum Pictures

Carlos Saura:

Carlos Saura collaborated with choreographer Antonio Gades on two works, with Gades’ setting of traditional Spanish flamenco form within highly theatricalised narrative frameworks subsequently translated to screen. In Blood Wedding (1981), documentary-style footage contextualises the production, as company members arrive backstage, and prepare for performance. Footage of class in the studio/performance space allows for experimentation with tightly framed feet and faces. Dancers and musicians remain visible by the side of the studio throughout, emphasising a sense of the familial, enclosed and self-created universe of company life. Christina Hoyos’ Bride changes costume by the side of the space, making visible the demarcation between performance and non-performance states. Intimacy of scale provided by studio setting emphasises the extreme theatricality of Gades’ approach, while also highlighting moments of screen-specifc engagement. Grouped facing out towards the camera, the performers hold positions without movement, accompanied by a complete cessation of sound. Elsewhere, floor-based duet work is framed from above, and extreme close-up of faces in profile and clicking fingers heightens a sense of claustrophobic menace. A slow-motion fight takes place in real time, with close in framing on faces and the sound of breath intensifying the intimacy of the encounter. As the piece ends, Hoyos, clad in blood-smeared bridal dress, is reflected back to the viewer through studio mirror.

Throughlines are clearly traceable from aspects of Blood Wedding to Saura and Gades’ subsequent collaboration Carmen, created from 1983. A feature length film, with complex narrative structure, Gades, Hoyos and the company play versions of themselves, engaging with the conventions of dramatic naturalism in fictionalised preparations for a flamenco-based theatre production. Scenes retain a flavour of documentary-style origin, with the image and significance of mirrors greatly expanded, exploring issues of identity, performance and duplicity. Gades and Laura del Sol, as the dancer chosen to play the production’s title role, are initially seen together reflected in a dressing room mirror, while a full-length, mirrored studio wall provides a constant view of company activity from director’s office.

As the film begins, Gades’ eyes, framed tightly in close-up, scan the screen, immediately reflected by camera pan across a studio-set sea of moving arms and torsos. In later class footage, a continuous, percussive journey of feet, followed by floor-level moving camera, crosses the space. A fight, framed through bodily mesh of performers, creates a sense of oppressive crowding, while overhead shots reveal a careful patterning of costumes for two opposing factions - purple, blue and green contrasting with red and black. A moment of knife-wielding is framed in close-up, with throat-slitting in soundless slow motion. Gades and another dancer duel, armed with sticks. The performers’ silhouettes expand the duet to a quartet, until only two shadows remain.

Moving from the universal to the particular, static camera positioning records an initially empty studio space filling with performers, as couples engage in partnered social dancing. The camera pans across densely-packed faces and bodies, locating Gades and del Sol in close-up. Music is used as a key element signalling emotional shifts and states. Paco de Lucia supplies a flamenco version of Bizet’s score for Gades’ ‘live’ production, while non-diegetic use of the orchestral version signifies undercurrents surfacing elsewhere within Gades and del Sol’s emotional interactions. This tension is established from the start of the film, as de Lucia and other musicians play by the side of the stage, as Gades, in headphones, listens to Bizet at an adjacent tape-deck. Gades and del Sol leave the production’s rehearsal area to the accompaniment of the opera’s climactic musical passage, and the stabbing of Carmen is enacted partially out of shot. The camera subsequently pans out and away from the main characters, revealing company dancers engaging in everyday, inter-rehearsal activities, in a final image underscoring the film’s ambiguously shifting exploration of performance and reality.

Saura, C. (dir.) Gades, A. (chor.) 1983 Carmen Momentous Pictures World Cinema Collection

Saura, C. (dir.) Gades, A. (chor.) 1981 Blood Wedding First Classic Films

Wim Vandekeybus:

Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus achieved international acclaim in 1987 with his company Ultima Vez’ debut stage production What The Body Does Not Remember. Vandekeybus’ signature movement vocabulary emphasises extreme physicality and athleticism, with gender relations often portrayed as a zone of combat. Blush, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005, concerns the physical, emotional and mythic dynamics of passion. Vandekeybus convincingly transcends the work’s stage-based origins, making use of a range of cinematic styles with great confidence and fluency. The sense of a distinctive choreographic language is retained and expanded to engage with visual storytelling in a mix of poetically-oriented imagery and devices.

Blush is located within a mythic world, where naturalism blends with dance in extreme emotional states such as dreaming and dying. The film bypasses traditional linear narrative structure, but explores a layered and highly associative narrative progression. A Bride is identified early on, and also, by association, her bridegroom. Threshold states function as a boundaries between life and death, waking and dreaming, poetic lyricism and naturalism. Frogs appear throughout the film, in their capacity as amphibious creatures inhabiting both water and land, and as the symbol of fairy-tale related romantic transformation. The human performers also inhabit a recognisably naturalistic world of social gatherings, a pastoral idyll of land and water, and a netherworld of dream and myth.

The work begins with the green of a sun-drenched cane field, and a close-up of a frog. A monologue, delivered by female voice-over, is heard as the film’s titles appear. The speaker’s face and head appear as the monologue progresses, framed tightly against Corsican sky and sun. The film is composed as a series of disparate scenes, beginning with female narrator, flanked by a group of other young women, entering a darkened interior to sit, and continuing her emotionally charged address of apparent renunciation and loss to the camera positioned in front of her. A widened shot reveals an attentive male figure, seated opposite at a large table, and surrounded by male dinner guests. While no traditional dance content is featured, Vandekeybus makes use of a number of distinctively choreographic strategies in relation to filming as the dinner party progresses, making use of a more naturalistic performance style, incorporating dialogue. The camera slowly and continuously pans around the table, alternating with overhead shots of table-dancing guests, and eye-level framing of their moving feet. A series of close-ups foreground the bride and groom in a competitive ‘toast’, which ends as the bride’s glass shatters in slowed-motion. Guests assemble for a full-figure group picture, captured by traditional, front-on, camera positioning, as the performers hold the static gaze of the camera/audience for longer than is entirely comfortable.

An abrupt switch is made to an outdoor location, as the character of the Bride, in a flowing white night-shirt like dress, feeds pigs, and four men, including her groom, walk towards an open expanse of field. A stretch of water, occupying the bottom half of the screenspace, is counterbalanced an overhanging outcrop of rock. Four female heads appear in turn from under the water’s surface, placed at differing proximities to the central, static camera position. The women emerge from water to shoreline, appearing equally at home on land in a sensually animalistic movement vocabulary. A trio of men in a clearing engage in a vigourously physical series of rolls, drops and jumps, with movement and vocalisation mimicking the sheep and goats in their care. A female interloper breaks into the trio, initiating a sequence of chase and pursuit through the rocky landscape. Filmed as a series of quickly-moving close-ups of feet, legs and earth, the chase is illustrated from the perspective of both pursuer and pursued. In a series of underwater shots, attendant slowing of motion provides a sense of partial abstraction, with performers glimpsed close-in as kicking legs and feet. A trio dance in sand by the shoreline, their arms linked in playfully changing circular formations, suggestive of solidarity in shared female identity. A series of mixed gender trios retain the part-playful circular linkage of bodies, connecting in close proximity and rarely straying beyond the distance of arms length. Hands connect to faces, initiating turns, with sudden inward pulls towards the axial figure conferring a sense of a tight social grouping and kinship. The Groom dives underwater, as the Bride negotiates a pathway down stone steps and along a narrow path. The movements of two men and one woman develop into increasingly problematic sexualised content. The bride climbs upwards, arrestingly framed against the blue of the sky and the whiteness of the rock. Three trios, filmed in differing proximities to camera, reveal partially-abstracted movement configurations. The Bride, framed against the sky at the edge of the cliff-face, sways. Trio performers fall to the ground, leaving the Groom alone standing upright. A series of fast edits, in tight close-up of the Bride’s face, are suggestive of a fall. The Groom runs with great urgency and the Bride’s face appears, falling in the slowed-motion movement language of the underwater state.

A new sequence signals a shift to an interior space, gradually revealed as church or village hall, with a stage at one end, occupied by a band. Performers of differing ages are seated around the edge of the floorspace, functioning as impassive chorus of observers/spectators. Choreographic content mixes with more naturalistic narrative advancement, interconnecting on an equally illustrative basis. The Groom lies prone on the hall’s empty floorspace, face-down as though incapacitated by grief. The Bride stands near to his outstretched arms in her white dress, combing her hair. Other performers enter the space, as women fasten dresses and men button shirts. The movement vocabulary contrasts the reaching, unfolding, and lengthening of the floor-based figures with the upright progression of the standing. Floor-bound hands reach to connect with ambulant feet in an overtly unequal contract of dependency and need. Floor-level camera travels the length of bodies. Two men uncurl, as two pairs of female feet walk over their backs, and lying feet connect side-on around arcing pathways to stepping ones. The Bride tends to the Groom and to other of the men, straightening ties and smoothing collars. Outside the hall, she holds an item of clothing to her face, as though inhaling its smell. The performers gather in a repeat of the portrait grouping, this time clothed in black, with the figure of the white-clad Bride visible in the background, before an apparent continuation of her underwater fall, her hair in close-up streaming like seaweed. Her mouth opens and a frog swims out and away.

The work then switches to an engagement with ‘real world’ naturalism and dialogue, delivered in a variety of languages. A party or reception takes place, with the same guests in dark suits and dresses. Over the course of the scene, two arguments develop, shown in parallel. In a kitchen, a flirtatious exchange on love and death is interrupted by a confrontation from an aggrieved partner. Elsewhere, three men discuss love as a chemical reaction, which develops into a vigourous argument, continued outside. The argument can be heard as three women shift into more stylised movement content, turning and swirling skirts as they change positions from sitting to standing, and all of the guests join together in a toast.

The film’s narrative line subsequently advances by means of montage, revisiting the green of the cane field, and a close-up of the frog. Footage of the Groom in a rural, exterior location, is intercut with that of the Bride as she disappears into an opening in the earth. Propelled along a darkened, subterranean passageway, other faces, nightmarishly distorted in close-up, travel along the same route, while the Groom’s progression is tracked by following camera. Action moves into a red-lit studio location, suggestive of the decaying interior space of an industrial warehouse. A moving camera explores slowly, as the Bride is pulled from the opening in the earth, surrounded by men who strip her of her white dress, taunting with words and blows. The viewer is moved into further recesses, encountering disturbing tableaux of loveless interaction, before returning to the Bride, whose tears are sucked through straws. The Groom reaches her, attempting comfort, and heralding the start of a new sequence presenting Vandekeybus’ choreographic language in a variety of inventively filmic ways.

The camera is used to suggest a series of interlocking and oppressive cell-like interior spaces, each housing an ongoing strand of choreographic development. Two opposing factions of a crowd face one another, later converging into a melee. Two men closely circle before locking shoulders and then heads, with framing tight in on moving bodies throughout. Composer David Eugene Edwards, already a performative presence in previous scenes, is sporadically seen, filmed by jerkily moving camera. What appears as a continuous tracking shot moves through a series of adjacent spaces, each inhabited by a duet or trio, engaged in the ongoing combat of physical blocking. The Bride and Groom engage in an ambiguous meeting, with the movement vocabulary of conflict tinged by alternative possibilities. As the sequence ends, the Groom, flanked by a group of men, gathers up the Bride, running the length of the passageway, and out of shot. In an exterior landscape of water and sunlight, the Groom carries the Bride in their return to shore, where a line of men stand between the water and the land. A male voice-over is heard, with the Bride shown alone and upright. A close-up of the Groom as he turns his head to look behind him is followed by an abrupt cut to a new sequence.

The viewer is returned to the aftermath of the reception. A man lies, snoring in an apparently drunken state, as a woman climbs on top of the sleeping figure. Footage of their one-sided coupling is intercut with imagery of the Bride, emerging from the water, staggering and falling in an attempt to reach land, and of the Groom by the shoreline, accosted by a woman in a vivid red dress. Three red-costumed duets enact a movement vocabulary of lifts and falls with passionate physical abandon. At the party, the sleeping man awakes to find himself alone, as the Groom runs, and the Bride continues her attempt to emerge from the water. The Groom reaches the grounds of a ruined building at night, and the red-clad duets develop their vocabulary of embrace and surrender. Images are revisited as a man, finding a frog in the grass, raises it to his mouth. The couples talk intensely, later shouting, although no sound can be heard. The film’s end titles appear against an underwater background, and a lone swimming figure ends the piece.

Blush appears to show a series of events co-occurring in a variety of inter-related, non-linear psychological states, such as dream and myth, as well as external reality. Many influences are apparent, with the Bride and Groom functioning as archetypal figures, rather than as named characters. Dialogue is used sparingly and in a highly stylised way, and Vandekeybus convincingly utilises passages of formalised choreographic content as one element of an integrated, filmic whole. A range of choreographers recently directing screenbased versions of their stage-based work include Edouard Lock, Lloyd Newson and Vandekeybus. All three are drawn from the performance-making traditions of dance-theatre, where a choreographer is likely to arrange multi-disciplinary collaborative elements, generating material by devising tasks, rather than concentrating purely on the creation of codified, step-based dance. Vandekeybus has undoubtedly benefited from a history of collaborative work with actors, musicians and filmmakers in the creation of his stage-based output, and this translates in Blush into a facility for weaving strands of elements and imagery within a distinctively overarching creative vision.

Vandekeybus, W. 2005 Blush CCCP/Total Film

Hybrids - Filmwaves

2009-11-13T17:08:00.000Z

Article on hybridised dance/screen practice in Filmwaves:

http://filmwaves.co.uk

Archive Highlights: Dance on Screen - RealTime

2009-11-13T17:06:00.000Z

Article on RealTime’s extensive coverage of screendance by Erin Brannigan.

http://www.realtimearts.net/feature/Archive_Highlights/9622

Johanna Billing in RealTime

2009-11-13T17:00:00.000Z

Review of Swedish artist Johanna Billing’s work at the Arnolfini, Bristol in October 2009.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/93/9621

Shiftwork 1999-2009

2009-10-25T19:02:00.001Z

Shiftwork 1999 - 2009: A Retrospective Manifesto
The Art of the Possible

‘The old editing technology was prohibitively expensive for everyone except professionals and the most dedicated amateur filmmakers. Now the lid’s off...there are lots of other kinds of filmmaking possibilities opening up in the wide spectrum between home movies and feature films’.

Walter Murch

‘I am also convinced that the chances of completing any project are inversely proportionate to the number of people upon whose cooperation it is dependent...the more one is dependent on circumstances exterior to one’s own adaptability, the more discouraging the entire effort. One is not likely to take the time to arrange the angle and framing very precisely when either the clouds are mounting rapidly from the horizon, or the ‘extras’ are becoming thoroughly tired, bored, hungry and disillusioned about the ‘glamour of film-making’. Under such pressure one hurries through, hoping that somehow it will turn out better than it does. It never does’.

Maya Deren

Shiftwork - an artist-led research partnership, experimenting with boundary-crossing aspects of visual arts and new media practice, digital technology and dance.

In November 1999, new media artist Jake Messenger and dance artist Chirstinn Whyte set out to explore the potential for creative interaction with home computer. The name Shiftwork was chosen to reflect a pattern of unfunded experimentation fitted around core, paid commitments, and the development of a website began a long term focus on DIY culture.

Over the next two years, equipment was acquired, in the form of a single chip digital video camera, and three halogen lamps. Dancer friends and students were filmed in hit-and-run, guerilla-style sessions in living rooms and smuggled into studio spaces. Improvised movement produced useable footage within short time slots, with only framing options pre-planned, and work emerging organically through the edit. Identification of single images helped train an editing eye, with stills arranged as skeletal maps, fleshed out into self-contained pieces.

A three year PhD studentship provided access to space for filming at Middlesex University. Dance artists’ volunteered input fed into a forty-two piece cycle of work, filmed in short, movement-centred sessions. Exploring up to half-a-dozen ideas within each one bypassed the event-driven focus of traditional film-making in favour of an open-ended, process-led approach.

The resulting work has been shown across five continents, and, as dial-up has given way to broadband, a constantly-evolving version of the original website attracts a steady stream of global traffic. Unfunded exploration continues into the potential of hand held mobile phone and flip cameras, video blogging and found footage, as working practices adopted from necessity evolve into positive choice.

With thanks to all collaborators - www.shiftwork.org.uk

Response to Figuring Landscapes - Claudia Kappenberg

2009-08-21T20:18:00.000+01:00

This written response to the Tate's Figuring Landscape programme from early in 2009 is by dance and visual arts researcher Claudia Kappenberg, who is currently leading the Network For Discourse and Publication in Screendance.

http://theartofsabbatical.tumblr.com/...

(image: Moebius, which features in Moves08 Dance Theatre Journal and Dance On Screen 2006 in RealTime)

Practitioner writing - Becky Edmunds

2009-08-19T20:42:00.000+01:00

Two articles - on the process of translation to screen, and Argentinean-based artist residency - by specialist dance videographer and researcher Becky Edmunds.

On Documentation: A Work Of Art From A Work Of Art

http://beckyedmunds.com/#/on-documentation/4531976852

Seeing Anew - RealTime

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue77/8345

Heat:Light:Motion featured in Moves08 - Dance Theatre Journal, and Dance For Camera 07 - RealTime.

(image www.beckyedmunds.com)

Moves09 - Film & Festivals

2009-08-19T20:32:00.000+01:00

Report on Moves09 by London-based independent curator Gitta Wigro, who has previously programmed for festivals including Dance on Screen and dancefilmday.

http://content.yudu.com...

(click cover link for Moves09)

Moves09 - Film International

2009-07-15T21:43:00.000+01:00

Article on Moves09 from Film International

http://www.filmint.nu/?q=node/161

Moves09 - RealTime

2009-06-21T23:15:00.000+01:00

Article on Manchester-based festival of movement on screen, April 2009.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/91/9468

Dance for Camera '08 - RealTime

2009-02-22T19:13:00.000Z

Article on Brighton-based Dance for Camera Festival, Dec 2008 from RealTime.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue89/9341

Moves08 - Dance Theatre Journal Vol 23:1

2008-10-10T22:19:00.000+01:00

‘Screendance is dead - Long live screendance’.1 This catchy sloganeering emerged as a rallying cry from the recent Open Source Video Dance Symposium, reflecting an artform shift from the on-screen adaption of ready-made dance, towards a more fluid and choreographically-led approach to practice. Over five days in April, under Pascale Moyse’s continuing direction, Manchester-based Moves cast its programming net wider than traditional notions of screendance would generally allow, in its second incarnation as an independent event. Development has coincided with a nationally changing festival landscape, as the loss of London-based Dance on Screen has been balanced by a compensatory growth of activity in Brighton and the North West. As a result, Moves geographical base has expanded rapidly to include regionally-based partner venues; a Northern England-wide public screen touring programme, and a national and international proliferation of its post-festival touring circuit.

With a remit to programme across genres, the festival has managed to side-step any charges of ghettoisation, catering for special interest groups including animators, short film makers, sound and digital artists, in addition to its core screendance audience. This has allowed for the emergence of a strong regionally-based practitioner grouping, cannily nurtured by an emphasis on participatory events, in the form of filmmaking labs; conference strand and well-attended discussion forums. From the latter, cross-platform networking emerged as an area of particular significance. A revelatory moment, and a forest of raised hands, followed Katy Dymoke’s request to identify all those in the room with any networked affiliations, while a series of artists voiced an increasingly independent stance towards the issue of funding, summarised in Mariela Greil’s observation, ‘I couldn’t wait any longer for that so I got up and did it myself’.

A commitment to non-traditional sites this year combined a venture into podcasting with screening venues ranging from city centre bars to Piccadilly Station. Staging such interventions is a risky business, and the potentially conflicting demands of public accessibility and optimum viewing conditions were tackled head on by placement of Claudia Kappenberg’s Moebius installation (2008) within a glass-fronted public building, viewable to passers-by from a Manchester street corner. Location and form combined in a fuller realisation of Kappenberg’s practice than previous placings within single screen festival format have allowed. Cleanly projected across three squat plinths, and lighting up Manchester dusk, archive footage merged into arresting abstraction, as newly-generated, body-centred imagery functioned as a point of mediation between inner and outer, archival and contemporary, memory and present tense.

Over a five day screening schedule, seven individually themed programmes set narratively-based short films against animation and dance-centred work, complemented by guest-curated slots from the archives of Cananda’s BravoFACT and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival. Sequentially-ordered screening can trigger overload, as carefully constructed, self-contained worlds clash and merge in a bid for viewing attention. As Moves’ programming strength lies in the profusion of content, the planned addition of breathing spaces between works will benefit audience experience and artists’ cause. Woven through the fabric of individual programmes, distinctive examples of international work included Laurent Achard’s sound-based evocation of inward experience in Fear Little Hunter (2004); Lutz Gregor’s juxtaposition of real-time narrative with non-linearity in Maps of Emotion (2008) and Yves Ackerman’s Prototype (2007), where a single male figure, viewed face-on against a featureless backdrop, flails and buckles in near-abstracted slow-motion amid impact-driven clouds of dust, in a striking decontextualisation of action-film violence.

In a northward migration from its Brighton base, a specially-arranged edition of the Dance for Camera Nights series focussed in depth on the working processes of British-based makers. Curated by South East Dance and chaired for Moves by Marisa Zanotti, the creative paths followed by Rachel Davies, Simon Ellis and Andy Wood provided a shifting focus for debate, with a careful dissection of current work led by Davies’ large-scale interweaving of image, sound and personal testimony, created in installation form in 2007 for the Manchester Festival. The Assembly bears the imprint of earlier work Gold (2004) in its focus on the interconnected social and artistic experience of teenaged girls, in this instance as members of a choir. Davies’ practice appears to have expanded to fill the demands of creating on a wider canvas, as, in the first of three excerpts, and sited within an empty school music room, the layered voices of unseen now-adult women, reconnecting through memory with their earlier selves, are set against a gradual shift from sunlight to darkness. Elsewhere Davies makes use of a highly polished ‘music video’ aesthetic, floating blossom-pink petals across the whispered singing of Boy Band lyrics, contrasting with documentary-style rehearsal footage of a contemporary choir. The young women's’ greeting and grooming rituals subsequently exaggerate into gesture-based vocabulary, guided through formally-gowned recital by conducting hands. With a professional grounding in visual arts, rather than dance, Davies has, in previous work, relied on the input of externally generated movement, collaborating with Annie Lok in We Got Old (2002); Hanna Gillgren for Gold, and Manchester-based dance artist Julia Griffin for The Assembly. A notion of choreographic engagement most clearly emerges, however, from Davies’ own distinctive sense of camera journey and compositional overview.

In contrast, Simon Ellis’ experimentation with brevity of timeframe included a series of two-second video sequences, created for iPod viewing, with tiny increments of manipulated movement distinguished by a staccato, blink-and-you-miss-it quality. Additionally, Ellis’ Then/Now (2007), closely framed the throat movement of a female figure, set against disquietingly heightened breath sound, evoking a bodily memory of trauma with extreme economy of means. Leeds-based Andy Wood’s recently filmed work-in-progress focussed on the shifting visual and spatial relationship of contact-based improvisers to camera. Brian Massumi has outlined the differences between the visual system, which he describes as an ‘exoreferential sense, registering distances from the eye’ and that of proprioception, which, he states, is a self-referential process of registering ‘displacements of the parts of the body relative to each other’.2 Wood’s practice currently seems poised on the brink of abandoning the traditionally distanced, directorial stance of the ‘outside eye’ to capture proprioceptive engagement from within a mutual, movement-led, improvisatory basis. Exploring similar territory, Wood’s Three’s A Crowd (2007) foregrounded the intense mutual focus of a male/female duet, with sudden push-pull shifts of physical and emotional dynamic captured at close quarters by the also moving camera.

Elsewhere, work by British-based artists Becky Edmunds and Alex Reuben featured prominently. Brighton-based Edmunds has spoken of previous work, such as Have You Started Dancing Yet? (2004), as inhabiting a zone ‘between documentation and documentary’.3 Recent work, created in partnership with sound artist Scott Smith, and cross-scheduled throughout programmes, revealed a marked shift in practice. A linear version of the’ multi-screen installation Stones and Bones (2007) highlighted Edmunds’ extreme selectivity of focus, defamiliarising the actions of a rocking body, a nodding head, a sketching hand. Stan Brakhage has stated that ‘as the eye moves, the body is in motion’ 4 and the work’s repetition and layering of sound and image combined to create a kinesthetically-oriented viewing experience of near-hypnotic overload, in a co-equation of eye, hand and mind. In the first of two works developed from an Argentinean-set South East Dance and Arts Council England Fellowship, Heat:Light:Motion (2007) set mirage-like emergences and disappearances of a never fully visible figure against an unchanging horizon line, with alternating body movement and stillnesses punctuated by the wind-whipped motion of a skirt. The single-shot work On The Surface (2007) pushed graphic simplicity and conceptual economy to extremes, as the camera recedes from the vertical still point of a single figure, diminishing in scale relative to the bleached expansion of the surrounding plain. Both of the latter works filter Edmunds’ approach through a more overtly stylised engagement with movement content, while remaining atmospherically distinct.

In an innovative festival commission, Alex Reuben, currently British Council Artist in Residence in Brazil, assembled a customised programme of work created over the course of the last seven years, drawing on his music-led professional background. At a subsequent Question and Answer session, Reuben spoke of the importance for makers of continued artistic development, and Reuben’s own creative experimentation ran as a unifying thread throughout the programme. A series of short pieces, including the elegantly pleasing simplicity of an animated line, swaying in rhythm to a music-driven pulse, in Que Pasa (2001), and the musically-governed profusion of graphic elements in Line Dance (2004), were interspersed with excerpts from the larger-scale Routes (2007). Reuben has reworked the latter piece, now conforming to the non-linear traditions of poetic documentary-making, into a series of music and movement-led encounters, located culturally and geographically within the landscape of the southern U.S. states. Impromptu performances to camera include ritualised Native American step-patterning and the casual virtuosity of porch-set cloggers, as the improvisatory basis of an often-moving camera matched the non-linearity of the work as a whole. The event’s personalised format reflected this year’s festival focus relating sound and image - also integral to Reuben’s practice-base - while providing a time-sliced overview of individual output.

Maya Deren was of the opinion that a grounding in ‘one of the time arts - i.e. the dance or music’. was an ideal preparation for a career in filmmaking.5 Cross-matching influences across a spectrum of British-based work reveals areas of commonality in Kappenberg and Davies’ visual arts training; Wood and Rueuben’s backgrounds in both visual art and music, and Wood, Edmunds and Reubens’ improvisatory camera style. Diversity of influence supplied a throughline to festival programming in a snapshot of current British practice, ranging from the careful matching of movement to landscape in Imogen Sidworthy’s 7A.M. (2006); to the performatively-oriented playfulness of Liz Aggiss’ Diva (2007). Elsewhere, Julie Angel set the hyper-motility of practising parkouristes against concretised urban angularity in MySpace (2005), while the image-based fluency of Lisa May Thomas’ The Elders (2006), translated to the modestly-scaled grammar of schools-based work in Challenge 59/Fruity Action(2007), intercutting the rolling action of an apple with the dislocating shock of a dive into water. Boldizsar Csernak’s split-screen experimentation set close cropped hand against full figure framing in A Single Glass of Water Lights Up The World (2008), while a newly-added musical score provided further layering to the visually-evocative mix of monochrome and colour footage in Phillipa Thomas’ Electric Desert (2006). For the final night programme, Susanna Wallins’ South-East Dance produced and IMZ award-winning Night Practice (2006) carved out a range of territory entirely of its own, in a highly original screen conceptualisation, as elements of documentary, narrative and close-framed motion conjured an ambiguous and distinctive atmospheric tone from a minimal palette of constituent parts.

The ‘Open Source Declaration’ reflects the scattering and reconfiguration of previously familiar screendance tropes, refracted by artists through a patchwork of individualised practice, and foregrounded by the eclecticism-in-action of Moves’ programming policy. The issue of curation is one currently at the forefront of debate within the closely-knit professional grouping of screendance makers, programmers and academics. The sheer breadth of work provided by Moves’ curatorial decision making allows for contextualisation across genres, and access to a range of pieces hard to encounter elsewhere. Moves - like screendance - is a rapidly evolving creature, operating within a cultural climate where old certainties, definitions and assumptions relating to the nature of festivals, funding, dance, simply no longer apply. Moves achievement lies in acknowledging the artform’s evolutionary potential, and locating it within the wider field of contemporary moving image. If screendance is dead, long live screendance.

1 Open Source Video Dance Symposium, held at the Findhorn Foundation in North East Scotland, November 2007.

2 Brian Massumi 2002 Parables for the Virtual London Duke University Press p.179

3 Research seminar held at London School of Contemporary Dance, October 2006

4 Bruce McPherson (ed.) 2001 Essential Brakhage New York, McPherson & Company
p.124

5 Bruce McPherson (ed.) 2005 Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren New York McPherson & Company p.131

Moves08 - RealTime85

2008-06-05T22:17:00.000+01:00

Article on Moves08 for RealTime85

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue85/9042

Moves08 - Film and Festivals

2008-05-19T21:03:00.000+01:00

Article on Moves08 for Film and Festivals magazine

http://filmandfestivals.blogspot.com/2008/05/moves08-festival-of-movement-on-screen.html

Gstaadfilm 2008

2008-05-19T20:59:00.000+01:00

Written response to the Gstaadfilm Festival, Switzerland, March 2008.

http://gstaadfilm.ch/documents/texte_christinn_whyte.pdf

Stones and Bones (2007)

2008-05-19T20:51:00.000+01:00

A written response to Becky Edmunds, Scott Smith and Gill Clarke's multi-screen installation, Stones and Bones, shown in London in December 2007.

Within Sergei Eisenstein’s writing on the practice of montage construction, he highlights the importance of ‘not so much the sequence of segments as their simultaneity.’ This issue was foregrounded in Stones and Bones (2007), a four screen video installation created by dance artist Gill Clarke, videographer Becky Edmunds and sound artist Scott Smith, which was shown at the Siobhan Davies Studios in London during December ‘07. The work comprises episodically distinct sections of movement material refracted across a close grouping of monitors, each set within the space at differing heights. This positioning served to emphasise the irregularity of screen size and image tone, drawing the eye into at times disruptive and unexpected collisions and configurations of movement patterning emerging from the spatial interrelation of each image.

Throughout the work, Edmunds’ extreme selectivity of focus fostered an aleatory and abstracted viewing engagement through the minimal disclosure of visual information. Four views of a head as it gently nods and shakes were presented as a quartet of defamiliarised and disembodied eyes. A ground-level camera positioning explored rhythmic repetition to overload, amplifying the effect of a floor-based rocking action on the crown of a head; a quartet of hands. Within the format of the work, a naturalistic two way conversation becomes a gestural canon, as the viewing eye tracks the passage of hand to hair in a downward migration from screen to screen. A view from a train window translates into a kinesthetically-oriented viewing experience with the hypnotic convergence of sleepers into motion blurred abstraction. The recognisably specific movement quality of disembodied hands, and the colour flash of crayon against white paper, reveals the level of physicality inherent of the act of drawing, calling attention to the relationship of the viewing mind and eye to the physicalisation of execution. Time and viewer input are required to make sense of a gradual emergence, which never seems fully to arrive, of the soft-edged pastel blur of near-abstracted body parts, isolated into tiny increments of fragmented motion. In addition, Smith’s soundscape, gradually building and receding at different points throughout the work. layered elements of ambient and non-diegetic input, reflecting the subtlety and minimalism of image and the non-linearity of the work as a whole.

Stan Brakhage stated that ‘as the eye moves, the body is in motion’. Stones and Bones engenders a strongly physicalised viewing response in its kinesthetically-oriented exploration of the commonality of experience existing between the viewer, the film-maker and the subject, exemplified within the work as the interrelationship between eye, hand and moving body.

Dance for Camera 2007

2008-05-19T20:46:00.000+01:00

Article on South East Dance's Dance for Camera Festival 2007, commissioned by RealTime.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/83/8877

Moves07

2008-05-19T20:43:00.000+01:00

Article on Manchester-based Moves, completed during the final weeks of thesis writing, and commissioned by RealTime.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/80/8661

Dance on Screen 2006

2008-05-19T20:36:00.000+01:00

Article on the final Dance on Screen Festival at The Place, London, in 2006. Written during the final year of my PhD and commissioned by Sydney-based RealTime magazine.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/77/8344