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.

Exposed to Time

This chapter presents a cross-history of motion visualization, especially in relation to the human movement duration in time-based media. Such a crossover discourse from chronophotography to photodynamism facilitates a number of shifts from analytical to nonanalytical, and from scientific to artistic visual experimentation. Because chronophotography and dynamophotography remain unresolved fields, they offer a distinct way of perceiving how the body moves, quite separate from cinematic vision, which has become congealed into a dominant disciplinary visual and academic discourse. Within a chronophotographic collection of visual histories, the impact of classical movement analysis and Etienne Jules-Marey’s chronophotographic science on modern chronophotographic art (such as that of Marcel Duchamp) and Italian photodynamism is key. This complex historical crucible presents us with an enduring tradition of hybrid experimentalism in the visualization of the moving (dancing) body, which persists in digital contexts through work that combines chrono- and dynamophotographic visions.

Brazilian Videodance

This chapter reflects on some of the most important transformations that contributed to the development of Brazilian videodance. Proposing a feasible mapping of the many works considered to be the most emblematic in the last four decades, the study identifies three generations of creators, starting in the 1970s with Analívia Cordeiro, the next two decades with videodance festivals like Carlton Dance, and culminating in the twenty-first century with numerous artists, choreographers, and producers, and especially the project dança em foco. This videodance scene is in a constant process of transformation that needs to be investigated aesthetically, politically, and conceptually, in dialogue with ideas stemming from some of the most important Brazilian scholars in the areas of video and dance. This chapter also develops an approach to how videodance (re)invents the relation between video and dance with each new work, while additionally assessing how these works resonate within contemporary art contexts.

Resurrecting the Future

Loïe Fuller’s innovative use of light and motion (the two essential elements of any screendance) prefigured many such twenty-first-century experiments. This chapter discusses how Fuller used theatrical lighting to connect with and energize her vision of dance—through visual effects such as mirrors and shadows—and shows the development in her later career of a cinematic vision, especially in her first forays into film. It also discusses Fuller’s Le Lys de la Vie, tracing its influence on the work of filmmakers and theorists such as René Clair and Germaine Dulac, as well as its importance for the use and critical reception of film and video in contemporary dance. The critical reception of her work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries parallels in enlightening ways current dialogues about dance and technology, giving us an important historical perspective on the relationship between physical expression and visual abstraction, between body and image in dance.