In the Blink of an Eye

Canadian animator Norman McLaren claims that “animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn; what happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame; animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between the frames.” That has remained the default definition of animation since he first proposed it. Between the frames lie the alchemical transformations of animation and live-action cinema that exceed the still, photographed images. McLaren’s emphasis on the in-between may explain why his work involves stop-motion animation and was so strongly influenced by dance. Through consideration of McLaren’s collaborations with dancers in Ballet Adagio and Pas de Deux, but especially the aberrant movement and nonhuman dance of his A Chairy Tale, McLaren’s ability to animate change itself links dance’s potential for animation and animation’s ability to bring to screendance new potentials of the body.

Sensory Screens, Digitized Desires

Bombay cinema incorporated songs, dances, choreography, staging, and costumes from a variety of traditional forms to mark a modern national identity. The pioneering figure for using dance in films was Uday Shankar in his experimental film Kalpana. Bombay’s spectacular song-and-dance cinema then moves through films such as Chandralekha to contemporary Bollywood and its byproducts such as dance reality shows. The search for aesthetic modernity in India is embodied in the concept of “desire” as it evolved from traditional aesthetics to contemporary culture and new media technology; to uncover its evolution from Bombay cinema to reality show, I first analyze the historically transforming cinematography and content through a few select musicals. Secondly, I trace the emergence of the “Item” numbers in Bollywood and their relationship to music videos; and third, I explore the current expressions of screendance on reality shows in India as expressions of class mobility and democratization of culture

Virtualizing Dance

The central project of contemporary dance has been to create a spatiotemporal poetics of the body based on its relationship to gravity. Virtual reality technologies enable a much more radical deconstruction of the conventional dancing body; in three-dimensional computer-generated space, the laws of physics can literally be coded into being, and Susanne Langer’s notion of “virtual force” becomes negotiable by dancers on an entirely new scale. Dancers can float free of gravity or change their physical morphology seemingly at will. Game-engine technology enables “virtual choreography” in digitally generated worlds; motion capture technology is central to transferring dance movement into CG interactive environments. Drawing on work by dance technology artists and research centers around the world, this chapter argues that the poetic affordances of motion capture provide a fundamental shift in conceptualizing dance movement that expands dance’s ability to critically and artistically engage with virtual environments, and therefore with an increasingly virtualized cultural imagination.

A Rhizomatic Revolution?

The Internet and the representation and dissemination of videos posted on YouTube has greatly impacted the evolution of screendance, especially as related to popular dance—dance broadly recognized as performed by the “populace” in codified forms such as hip hop, in fads like the Macarena, or styles unique to individuals. Such videos reflect how issues of social justice and equity are addressed in the new digital environment. This chapter discusses two case studies, Where the Hell is Matt? and The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD), which illuminate how YouTube has successfully provided a platform for exposure to certain marginalized citizens and movement forms like urban dance. But tensions exist and questions abound in relation to their innovative aesthetics, rhizomatic spread, and democratizing and social justice potentials. Can everyday users of YouTube foster a more egalitarian society, especially as capitalist for-profit forces and commercial impulses exert more pressures on the Internet? The response to these questions remains complex and incomplete.

Real for Reel

Three prolific editing motifs have continued to resurface in screendance, from dance films created at the advent of cinema to the current era of digital video. By examining the use of suspension (hovering/flying), multiples (images of the same body/body parts), and repetition (instant replay, etc.), this chapter offers a deeper understanding of how three central editing themes have influenced the practical, aesthetic, and symbolic representation of choreography and its subject(s) on screen. The chapter approaches editing as a tool used to transcend traditional physical boundaries, aiming to expand the realm of screendance movement potential in space and time. In both dance and film history, how such effects are achieved in both historic and digital editing methods are addressed, as the chapter argues that screendance editing techniques are integral aspects of the genre's landscape, both past and present, that help to create a unique environment in which screendance thrives.

The Virtual Body Is Real!

Based on the studies of Don Ihde on the “embodiment relations” between the body and technological artifacts, Gretchen Schiller’s concept of “kinesfield,” and revisiting Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) concepts of “body schema” and “flesh of the world,” this chapter examines the forms of relation that are established in the bodily experience of mediadance, promoting new sensorial and perceptive experiences for dancers and for the public/participant/user, such as innovative forms of body re-presentations and new ways for the public to experience dance. Examples include intermedia performances that allow the performer to make changes to sound and light on the stage or in videos that, through cameras and software, translates movements into sound, light, or graphical patterns. Interactive user-computer software, like Wii and the Sony motion controller, allow the capture (by video) of the movement of the user transmitting it to a virtual body and environment. And dance telematics creates virtual encounters between remote dancers.

Behind the Screens

This chapter seeks to recuperate the dance legacies in Saturday Night Fever (1977) through a choreographic and cinematographic analysis of the film’s dance sequences. The ways the camera centralizes racialized, dancing bodies offers a perhaps accidental acknowledgement of the debt owed to black dancers. Centered around John Travolta’s Italian-American character Tony Manero living in a homogeneous Brooklyn neighborhood—where blacks were (and continue to be) unwelcome—Saturday Night Fever paradoxically exposes and pays tribute to the black roots of the screendancing. Travolta’s training for the film uncovers a complex dance history that reflects significant interracial contact behind the scenes as well as between and within singular bodies. There was interracial mixing in the backgrounds of the film’s top-billed choreographer, Lester Wilson, and Travolta’s uncredited dance instructor, Deney Terrio, and the modern, jazz, and street dance roots of the choreography shifts the film into a history of American concert and commercial dance practice.

An Interdisciplinary Reading of the Film Entr’acte

This chapter explores the 1924 film Entr’acte, by Francis Picabia and René Clair, as an interdisciplinary project that combines ideas of cinematography, music, and choreography. The film constitutes a significant project of the avant-garde of 1920s Paris, driven by a strong conceptual framework and influenced by early twentieth-century discourses which underpinned cultural, social, and economic developments. Dada in particular was part of this tight net of affiliations and differences. Entr’acte also constitutes a key moment in a wider development of twentieth-century film, a significant film in a Deleuzian shift from movement-image to time-image. The film’s choreographic impetus is summed up in George Barber’s claim that the film, and the key shot of the dancer, are informed by Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Entr’acte’s choreographic structure and its relation to the film is highly significant to a twentieth-century map of choreographic practices and screendance.

From Oakland Turfs to Harlem’s Shake

In an era of official “colorblindness” and liberal multiculturalism, widespread interest in and enjoyment of hip-hop expression is underwritten by structural antiblackness. Participants on and offline gain cultural capital by performing the social codes of blackness, diverting ethical attention from the urgency of black existence, and sustaining a feeling of broad reluctance, if not refusal, to engage seriously with the history, culture, and politics of black communities. This chapter discusses hood dance practices of Harlem Shaking and Oakland Turfing, which, linked to YouTube participation, constitute more than social identity; they incorporate black improvisational aesthetics linking movement to the social life of the black neighborhood. But choreocentricity—an institutional priority of Western mass-market concert dance—reconstitutes hip-hop forms into efficient formulae for profit, bringing hip-hop into a frame of whiteness to police its global production and marketability. Thus the global viral circulation of hip-hop dance resonates deeper attachments to both blackness and antiblackness in social media and the global dance industry.

Kinesthetic Empathy

The aim of this chapter is to use the concept of kinesthetic empathy as a framework to investigate the production and reception of dance made for the screen, focusing on the audience’s kinesthetic experience of screendance versus (or synergistically related to) live dance performances. The study employs kinesthetic empathy as a focus through which to analyze choreographers’ intentions in making, and audience responses to watching, screendance across a range of formats and styles, and whether there are common contributors to the viewing experience. Qualitative methods and interviews were employed to gather information from filmmakers and focus groups of viewers (pseudonyms were used when referring to conversations with the audience members) to investigate the creative process of making screendance and to explore the experience of the spectator. The findings revealed that viewers bring different experiences and histories with them to a viewing experience; however, there are shared conditions when experiencing kinesthetic empathy.