I had originally written this essay for an assignment in the MA Screendance programme. I continuously feel like I’m not eloquent enough, so please do let me know if I miss out on certain points.
Introduction
For as long as the medium of the moving image has existed, there has been intuitive fascination with capturing and presenting moving bodies on screen, and to a greater extent of such, an interest in being able to present dance on screen. Tracing it back to cinematic experimentation a mere three years after the invention of the Kinetograph by Thomas A. Edison in 1891, which “stage the relationship between the art of the dancing gesture in development of the subject” (Poli, 2021), films such as “Imperial Japanese Dance” (1894), and a series of films featuring dancer Annabelle Moore performing a “Serpentine Dance”, highlighted the new medium of “motion picture” and its ability to showcase movement, as well as the ability for film colourisation (Poli, 2021). The myriad of dance films that followed, featuring and experimenting with dance on screen, is a testament to the inherent interconnection between the disciplines of dance and film, as though a fated congruence. Films such as Fred Astaire’s “Dancing Lady” (1933), weaved choreography seamlessly into a film narrative, whereas Maya Deren’s “A Study in Chroeography for Camera” (1945) brought a new avante-garde, modernist idea towards “dance on screen”. All the way to the present era, where dance has been prominently featured in Hollywood feature films such as “La La Land” (2016) by Damien Chazelle, or being used as part of commercial advertising such as “The Mechanic” (2016) by Cillit Bang featuring dancer Daniel Cloud Campos performing various stunts.
Yet, while it is evident that dance and film have historically converged, and that dance has been present in film since its inception, non-dancers may often still face an initial hurdle when trying to watch and comprehend dance-film, also known as Screendance. Through the lens of kinesthetic empathy, an exploration of the situatedness of Screendance may offer potential insights to bridge this understanding gap.
Why Dance Film?
Firstly, it is pertinent to address the need to develop comprehension of dance-film beyond a dance-film maker’s sphere for several pivotal reasons. Creators, by virtue of their artistic endeavors, naturally yearn for a broader audience to interpret and engage with their work. Carroll states, "In order for the artist to accomplish the effects to which she aspires, the audience must cooperate creatively with what the artist has initiated” and that it is ultimately the audience that makes the art function (Carroll, 2014). The “dance on screen”, will not exist if not for the audience to view the said screen.
Secondly, a more expansive appreciation of dance-film could drive economic growth within the field. Drawing parallels with the traditional film industry, which has reaped the benefits of a vast and varied viewer base, Screendance, too, could experience a surge in investment and resource allocation with increased viewership, not only from customers as audiences but from development and integration into existing structures within the film industry. This can subsequently stimulate opportunities for artists, filmmakers, and other stakeholders involved. We see this in the rise of the superhero genre in the Hollywood film industry, which was “born out of economic necessity as much it is from cultural desires to see comic book heroes brought to life” (Brown, 2017). While the scenario that Screendance will become the next big Hollywood trend may initially appear speculative or aspirational, it offers a thought-provoking glimpse into the potential developments. Drawing upon this, it underscores the possibility that, given the right conditions and advancements, namely a cultural shift in the way we think about dance on screen, such outcomes could be realized.
Lastly, in a rapidly changing world where physical art forms face existential threats, ensuring their continuation becomes paramount. The global pandemic, as evidenced by the transition of numerous dance forms to online platforms during the COVID-19 era, shows the adaptive resilience of dance and its potential to persevere through digital mediums.
Screendance over the years has evolved alongside technological advancements and artistic innovations (Zanotti, 2019), and with increased accessibility towards the making and viewing of dance film work, there has been more care towards the resource development for the making, preservation, and archival of dance films.
Watching Dance Films
Sherrill Dodds builds on contextualization of watching Screendance, stating that “the screen orients us to watch dance under specific historical, technological and social conditions, which in turn shape how we invest in and value screendance… through understanding these frameworks of consumption, reception, and participation, we then have the option to choose how we engage with screendance and to what end. (Dodds, 2019)”. Screendance work serves as a vital repository of cultural memory, preserving intricate nuances of historical movements, societal values, and artistic expression. Being able to recognise and value this documentation of history through dance film, can guide audiences and global cultures toward more informed, empathetic, and culturally rich outcomes in both art and society.
Yet, our felt experiences of watching movement are also heavily contextualized by the medium and the environment that audiences watch them in. As artists and Screendance practitioners (that is to transform the medium of dance, movement, and choreography into a filmic experience), we must consider how Screendance work is diverse in its presentation, and how an audience’s reception of Screendance work is not solely defined by the movement itself, but manipulated by the way in which we present said movement through filmmaking techniques (i.e, intimacy of camera, editing techniques, mise-en-scène). The experience of watching a Screendance work, and the time and place that it is being viewed, is as important as the work itself.
I emphasize the term “felt experience” (which I may sometimes refer to as “felt sense”) in the expression of William Downes as an “encompassing linguistic of a phenomenology of feelings, where feelings can be organized into three types: emotion (bodily arousal), evaluations (scales from positive to negative), intuition (a compulsive sense of a non-propositional ‘meaning’) (Downes, 2000). The “felt sense” will be integral towards the way Screendance makers can position their thinking about the way audiences perceive their work. The key to unlocking this “felt experience” for non-dancer audiences may lie in Kinesthetic Empathy, loosely defined as the sensation of moving while watching movement (Wood, 2016).
It is argued that Screendance audiences are more vulnerable to experiencing Kinesthetic Empathy, as evidenced by Karen Wood’s study of viewer responses to selected contemporary dance films. However, “micro-aspects” identified in this study were challenging for participants to describe verbally, showing how “felt experience” can be difficult to express verbally (Wood, 2015). It is impossible to form a truly comprehensive analysis of “how much one can Kinesthetically Empathise” with a piece, as an individual’s felt experience is difficult to measure. Wood builds upon her study by explaining,
“A viewer’s post-experience reflective conversations may contribute to the screendance viewing experience by allowing articulation through language, which may enhance connection with the films… using focus groups to set up this environment has shown that this gives viewers the opportunity to discuss with other audience members their interpretation and understanding of the films and how this may stimulate kinesthetic engagement.”
Here, I offer a list of sample questions that Screendance makers would be able to use with audiences, to help gauge their “felt experiences”:
Emotion
At any point in time as you were watching the Screendance work, did you feel any physical sensations that matched what you saw on screen? (i.e. skin touching the floor, the taste of the food the performer was eating, the heaviness in the chest as the performer was breathing)
At any point in time as you were watching the Screendance work, did you feel any intensity of emotions? (i.e. Empathy, Anger, Sadness)
Evaluations
From a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the most negative, how do you feel about the Screendance work you just watched? (This question is intentionally designed to be open-ended to the audience’s interpretation, in order to gauge their individual feelings)
Following up, why do you feel this way?
How closely did you focus on the film? At any point, were you distracted by anything? This can be within the work itself, or the atmosphere where you are watching it.
Intuition
How was your experience watching the Screendance work?
How closely did you relate to the Dance / Movement aspect of the Screendance work?
How closely did you relate to the Film aspect of the Screendance work?
These questions are designed to enable articulation for an audience member during the post-viewing of a Screendance work, and stimulate kinesthetic engagement. It is important to also note, that still, “felt experiences” may be difficult to express verbally or in writing, and thus, it is encouraged that these questions be asked in a physical environment, such that the asker of the questions (the Screendance maker), will be able to tap into their own “felt sense” of “the audience’s felt experience of the work”. Asking the questions, may actually be more important for someone understanding a piece of work, than the content of the work itself.
To elaborate on the idea of “felt sense” in viewing a dance film, the field of Radical Screendance is one that experiments with how much one needs an actual human body to create the “dance” in dance film. Majority of the works addressed in the paper “Understanding the “Dance” in Radical Screendance” (2014) by Anne Heighway involve non-human bodies, creating the “sensation of dance” more than actually having dance movement, and requires viewers to “approach its works using mind over sight” (Heighway, 2014). According to Amy Greenfield in a dance film festival in the early 1980s, a screendance work “may not ‘look like’ a dance,” but has the “meanings of dance.” (Kappenberg, 2009). Thus, what this means is that for any kind of an audience to understand Screendance, we must be able to allow for the “meanings of dance” to be “felt” and “experienced”, as opposed to a viewer watching a dance work on screen, as simply “a dance work, on a screen”.
Intersecting the points brought forward by both Heighway and Greenfield, it emerges that there is an innate necessity for more dedicated spaces that foster a deeper comprehension of Screendance. Before, I spoke a little about how Screendance has, over the years grown alongside the evolution of technology, and how that has allowed for greater accessibility towards the making, viewing, and archiving of Screendance work. However, I would argue that conversely, social media and the rise of technology have also taken away much of the core experiences of watching a dance film. The act of watching a dance film in a cinema is distinctively different from watching it at home or on a handheld device, and for a form such as Screendance, which places such heavy emphasis on the “felt experience”, the lack of communal spaces for Screendance work, where every aspect of the film - from lighting to sound, to the space that they are in - becomes a part of the viewing experience of the film. As it were, it may also be worth considering the idea that, in order to allow non-dancers to “understand dance film”, we must play on their Kinesthetic Empathy, and their feelings of experiencing dance and “felt sensations”, and in order to do so, we must create communal spaces where the viewing of the Screendance may be controlled, and ultimately, doesn’t that simply make the experience of “watching dance film”, more like “the experience of watching dance”?
An Expectation to Define Screendance
Thus, in exploring the challenge of fostering Screendance comprehension among those unfamiliar with its practice, we find that the challenge for “understanding Screendance” is dual. On one hand, it’s about fostering a genuine, felt sensation within the viewer, by ensuring the Screendance work isn’t just witnessed on a superficial level, but is deeply felt and understood, by situating the entire experience of it, from the content to the viewing experience in it’s most optimal environment. On the other hand, we also recognise that “there are no universalised or textually determined responses to dance movement. Instead, spectators’ reponses were often very personal… influenced by prior experiences, expectations and taste.” (Reason & Reynolds, 2010). The very nature of the duality of this challenge, brings rise to a feeling of “lack” within Screendance artists, a sentiment echoed by many others in the field, and it may be this feeling of “lack” that prevents non-dancer audiences from approaching, appreciating, or understanding dance film. Katja Vaghi’s paper, “How Screendance Was Invented While We Were Busy Claiming It Wasn’t” highlights these feelings within the community:
While reading about screendance I cannot but notice a constant preoccupation. Many authors deplore the marginalized state of the practice and its lack of a solid scholarly discourse. If in early texts the complaints were vaguely formulated as a lack of outlets, works and artists, in later texts, they become very precise such as the necessity to define genres in moving-picture dance expressed by Nöel Carroll in 2000, to Douglas Rosenberg’s 2010 advocacy for excavating screendance genres closely or, also Rosenberg in 2016, the need for more cohesion in a diasporic and globally spread likeminded community. This leitmotif, this feeling of lack, goes against my perception of screendance as one of the fastest growing fields in dance, both in practice and theory.
The need to define genre or the need for more cohesion for a Screendance community, parallels our own questions of a need for understanding of dance film by non-dancers. Simply, the hybrid nature of the form of “Screendance”, despite its long history, and having already “reached a critical mass of works and research to ‘stand by itself’.” (Vaghi, 2019), allows for too many variables that prevents itself from recognising it as it’s own identity. Mitchell Rose pokes fun of this identity crisis in his Youtube video “A Case Against Dance-Film” (2020), saying “this field doesn’t even know it’s own name” when referring to the countless iterations of names to which this field of “dance and film” has decided to call itself. It is possible that, it is this complex, hybrid, identity crisis, to which non-dancers will never be able to understand dance-film, and that in order for one to understand dance-film, one most dive headfirst deep into the exploration of it. Much like how Heighway describes Radical Screendance as a “somatic approach to filmmaking” (Heighway 2014), it may be the case that all of Screendance requires a somatic, kinesthetic approach to experience a ‘felt experience’.
To return to the original premise, we have already established how dance and film has been inexplicably intertwined since the very inception of film history, and the fact that there is still dance on film work being made in modern day, and that there is still discourse surrounding it, is evidence that there is still a demand for Screendance work, and therefore, an audience for it. The challenge has never been about allowing “non-dancers to understand dance-film”, the challenge has always been about creating work through this medium, that not only non-dancers can “kinesthetically empathise” with, but holds a strong enough identity to call itself a perfect synergy between Dance and Film.
References:
Brown, Jeffrey A. 2016. The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture. N.p.: Taylor & Francis Group.
Carroll, Noël. 2014. “The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers, and/or Listeners Use Their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks.” Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199836963.003.0004.
Dodds, Sherill. 2019. “On Watching Screendance.” The International Journal of Screendance Vol. 10. https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v10i0.6726.
Downes, William. 2000. The language of felt experience: Emotional, evaluative and intuitive. 10.1177/096394700000900201.
Heighway, Anna. 2014. “Understanding the "Dance" in Radical Screendance."” The International Journal of Screendance Vol. 4.
Kappenberg, Claudia. 2009. “Does screendance need to look like dance?” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 5. 10.1386/padm.5.2-3.89/1.
Poli, Annamaria. 2021. The art of the Butterfly dance in the early film, in Conference Proceedings CIVAE 2021, 3rd Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education. Edited by MusicoGuia.
Reason, Matthew, and Dee Reynolds. 2010. “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance.” Dance Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767700001030.
Rose, Mitchell, dir. 2020. A Case Against Dance-Film.
Vaghi, Katja. 2019. “How Screendance Was Invented While We Were Busy Claiming It Wasn’t.” The International Journal of Screendance Vol 10. https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v10i0.6528.
Wood, Karen. 2015. “Audience as Community: Corporeal Knowledge and Empathetic Viewing.” In The International Journal of Screendance. Vol. Vol. 5. https://screendancejournal.org/index.php/screendance/article/view/4518/3878.
Wood, Karen. 2016. “Kinesthetic Empathy: Conditions for Viewing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, edited by Douglas Rosenberg. N.p.: Oxford University Press.
Zanotti, Marisa. 2019. “Digital spaces, analogue thinking: Some thoughts on Screendance.” The International Journal of Screendance Vol. 10.