Curious about 3D dance filmmaking? Check out this 6 minute FORA.tv video by Jacob’s Pillow Dance for an introductory primer.  Award-winning filmmakers Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer of Mouvement Perpétuel share their artistic approach and production process using visual examples from their current collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite and the National Film Board of Canada.  Millar and Szporer describe how a 3D camera works, share their 3D story boards, take us inside the green screen studio with the dancers, and discuss why they are interested in the challenge of creating a stereoscopic experimental dance film incorporating animation.

Can 3D dance film change how audiences experience and participate in dance? What do you think? Comments and links to other 3D dance film insights welcomed.

"Outside In" by Victoria Marks, Photo by Mark Lewis

Kinetic Cinema with Victoria Marks

Thursday, October 22nd, 7:00pm. $10 (at the door)

University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street, NYC

Kinetic Cinema explores the intersection of dance and the moving image both on screen and stage. For each screening Anna Brady Nuse, Pentacle’s director of Movement Media, invites a different guest artist to share a selection of films and videos that have inspired them. This month, award-winning choreographer and dance film-maker, Victoria Marks presents a program in which she weaves together her main cinematic influences with her own dance film work.

Workshop: Choreo-Portraits in Film with Victoria Marks

Friday, October 23rd, 10:00am-2:00pm

Chen Dance Center

8 East 1st Street, (btw Bowery & 2nd Avenue), NYC

In dance, trained and virtuosic bodies often stand in for the universal or human figure. How can cinematic movement studies capture the “who” of the performer, particularly as they move with another person? “Choreo-portraiture” is the name renowned choreographer and filmmaker Victoria Marks has given to dances she makes that are about the people who inhabit them. In choreo-portraits, Marks searches not for extraordinary feats, but for the small actions and interactions that communicate who these people are, alone and together. In this workshop, participants will consider this idea as they serve to design and shoot one another’s movements.

Open to dance and film professionals and students, registration is limited to 20 ppl. Workshop fee $35.00. Register online, or contact movementmedia@pentacle.org.

Movement Media in Philadelphia:

Presented by the Institution of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

Kinetic Cinema Wed. Oct. 21st at 6:30pm

Choreo-Portraits in Film Workshop Sat. Oct. 24th 10:00am-5:00pm

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

118 South 36th Street

Philadelphia, PA

Victoria Marks will also present her Kinetic Cinema screening and Choreo-Portraits workshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia in conjunction with their ground-breaking Dance with Camera exhibition.

Go to www.icaphila.org for more information and to register for the workshop.

"Not About Iraq" by Victoria Marks

Victoria Marks recent work considers citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. Marks has served as faculty in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA since 1995.  She is a 2007 EMPAC award winner for the creation of “Veterans,” a dance for the camera made with Margaret Williams.  “Veterans” won first prize in the Barcelona Video Dance Festival, 2008.  Marks is also a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and has received recent grants from the Irvine Foundation (Dance: Creation to Performance 2004 and DanceMaker 2002), the NEA (2005) and the Cultural Affairs Council (COLA 2001).  In 1997, Marks was honored with the Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.  Over the course of her career, she has been the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films with Margaret Williams, including the Barcelona VideoDance Prize, the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival, the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.

The conference was a production of Kaltura (developers of the world’s first full open source online video platform), Yale Internet Society Project, Participatory Culture Foundation (creators of the open source Miro internet TV player) and, in partnership with Mozilla, Red Hat, Creative Commons, Level3, Akamai, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and more.  In addition to talks from internet luminaries, screenings of video art, and demonstrations of the newest internet video technology, the event served as the inauguration of the Open Video Alliance, an umbrella coalition dedicated to furthering best practices in online video.

Yet as the medium matures, we face a crossroads. Will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Web video holds tremendous potential, but limits on broadband, playback technology, and fair use threaten to undermine the ability of individuals to engage in dialogues in and around this new media ecosystem.

The world of online video is pretty proprietary, but there are plenty of cool companies working toward widening the playing field and offering viewers more variety, flexibility and interactivity.  Amazing people spoke at the conference, including Clay Shirky, Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing, Yochai Benkler, Jonothan Zittrain and film producer Ted Hope, plus many others talking about the idea of Open Video – the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video, which would provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

Now that online video has gone supernova, will its future be shackled by intellectual property and copyright wars and other restrictions? Will it become television on the internet, owned and managed by the few and sold to the many (along with mind-numbing ads)? Or will it evolve to become a more participatory workspace, where suits, artists and surfers alike splice media into open-sourced masterpieces?

I attended a seminar by Ross Harley, “From Open Circuits to Open Video,” in which he argued that the “radical challenges to television, art and culture made by video artists in the 1960s and ’70s find their echo today in the principles of Open Source, Creative Commons, Open Content and other emerging principles of participatory culture.” Starting with quotes from Nam June Paik and moving on to a discussion of the online UbuWeb (“More than mere promotion of artists’ work, it is a global distribution outlet that increases the value of the work,” he said), that video artists can increase their audience by embracing the technological forces their creative ideologies presaged.

He quoted Lawrence Lessig (Founder of Creative Commons), saying, “The more you share something, the more valuable it becomes,” and while that dictum is indeed central to the thinking of many artists, there’s another group that believes differently. There wasn’t enough discussion of the role of scarcity in the creation of some video art’s value, the role of the viewing environment in constructing its meanings (most specifically with regards to site-specific work and videos intended to be viewed in gallery environments), and the way in which a mode of distribution can form part of its actual content. Harley seized on the stated political ideology of a generation of video artists without really examining their social practices, in some cases ingrained Ludditism, and, for some, their resistance to upending traditional support structures. On a more practical note, Harley advocated against YouTube and its corporate terms of use, saying “FLOSS platforms give artists more freedom” and “creators need to use the publishing services that work best for them.”

This report wouldn’t be complete without the mention of “Sita Sings the Blues” by Nina Paley

While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have thought at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.

Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack.

What kind of future does the Open Video Conference, and all of its bright minds, wish for?

“One where video is ubiquitous,” explained the Open Video Alliance’s media coordinator Adi Kamdar in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Everybody has access to low-cost, or even free, tools and software, and open standards allow all devices to be interoperable. It’s also a future where everybody knows how to manipulate video, and where video is freely created, edited, shared, remixed, quoted and archived. Participation is king and free expression is the norm.”

Whether it’s text, music or video, the future demands digital sharing.  If we have any hopes of success in bringing the general public an understanding of our views on the importance of openness and freedom, forming a larger community with like minded content creators is the next logical step and another piece of the puzzle.

Watch the closing remarks from the first day of the conference and share your thought with us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Capitol Spring 2 by Boris Willis

Boris writes:

Why should artists create a dance vlog? I believe the answer lies in the number of times we have to explain what we do and have little in our culture to point to as an example. We have an opportunity to reach out to the public to show and explain the process of what we do, why we do it and how we feel about it. Here are some tips for you to think about as you make your dance vlogs.

1. Have a vision
   Find a way to make videos that you feel express who you are and what you want to say as a dancer. That being said, don’t just turn on your camera and dance, find a way to make an interesting and exciting video. Look at commercials and other short videos as inspiration.
2. Vlogging is personal and performative
   Make your vlog about you because it is the one subject that you know more about than anyone else. Dance, talk about dance, talk about making dance while you are dancing, dance about making dance.
3. Understand how the web is used
   Just because you have twenty minutes of footage doesn’t mean you should post it all to your vlog. Generally speaking three minutes is the most someone will watch. In other words keep it short, a sixty second video is plenty. As you gain more skills you will be able to make longer videos compelling by the way you edit them. It is always better to leave them wanting more than to bore them. Make stuff that people want to see and make it short enough that they watch it all.
4. Edit
   Learn how to use the tools of video editing. There are free editing tools that come with your computer operating system, Window’s Movie Maker for Window and iMove for the Mac OS. If you want to be able to do more sophisticated editing you can get Final Cut Express for the Mac and Premiere Pro Elements for the PC. For professional level editing you will need something like Premier Pro CS 4 for the PC and Final Cut 6 for the Mac. The great thing about video is that you can take the time to get it right and make your content compelling. However, the most important edit you make is at the end of your video, use a black out when the video is over and put your credits at the end of each video without a blackout so the credits are the last thing your audience sees. That way if your video gets distributed around the web everyone will know its yours.
5. Get the best camera you can afford
   You never know what will become of your work it is always best to get the highest quality video of your original work. When you put it on the web it will get compressed and lose quality but that is what we expect from the web. Having a high quality version for showing offline is a very good idea. I also recommend that you use a camera that records to video tape so that you have a backup. I always shoot in HDV but down-convert to SD to save disk space then compress it to the Quicktime format which eventually gets converted to flash.
6. Find a video host that you like
   I have been in debates about whether it is better to put your videos on Vimeo or YouTube or Blip.tv. There is no reason not to try all three and of any number of others. Just find one that you like. If image quality is what is most important then Vimeo is for you. If ease of distribution is what is most important then Blip.tv is for you. If getting your videos seen by a large number of people then YouTube is the way to go. There are pro’s and con’s for all three services and I use all three and others as well. Once you decided on a host for your videos choose a host for your blog. Blogger and Wordpress are two popular services that give you a variety of tools to enhance your content.
7. Be Consistent
   Follow your vision, update on a regular basis, make videos in manageable viewing times for your audience. You are not going to make money from advertising on your vlog but you can use your vlog as a tool to get work by showcasing your skills as a performer, choreographer, editor and artist. Let your followers know what you are up to especially when you are taking a break. People want to know that when they go to your blog there is regularly new content there that they want to see. Your dance vlog should be fun and informative. You should do it because you enjoy it.
8. Say hello
   How do you get people to follow your vlog? Email your friends, comment on other people’s vlogs, tell people you meet, get cards made. You can get free cards online from Vista Print.
9. Music
   Don’t use copy-written music. Find a musician among your friends or on the web that will let you use their music in exchange for some cross promotion. You can find plenty of music at this url http://www.archive.org/index.php Learn about Creative Commons use and credit the musicians for their work.
10. Describe the videos you make
    Write a description of the videos you post and use tags to help yourself and others find them. It is time consuming at first to describe your work but the value in doing so cannot be underestimated. Describe what you are doing in the video, give the location, who is in the video, when it was done and what the video is about.

-Boris Willis

danceaday.com

Reality Dancevision: An Intimate Screen Capture of Dance Vloggers- Program Notes and Videos

Curator’s Note:

Boris Willis by Paul Emerson

The dance vlogger it seems, is a rare person to find. It is relatively easy to find dance bloggers, dance writers and dance photographers but finding professional dancers/choreographers who use the web as a primary source for showing a dance is more difficult. We see the powerful influence of the web with the disappearance of newspapers and the emergence of e-book readers such as the Kindle, the emergence of iTunes Music Store as the world’s largest seller of music, as well as the question of whether DVD’s will soon be outpaced by movie downloads. Even in this digital age, people love dance, as evidenced by video sharing sites that are replete with videos of the latest social dances and sophisticated dance videos made by amateurs.. I think that just as reality television can take you into the lives of ordinary people, online dance can take you into the lives of dance makers. We can get an intimate look at the person, not just the performer, through online video. I can’t predict that the web will provide a revolution in theatrical dance. However, I do sense a shift by some artists who feel as I do that one does not have to wait for their two nights in the theater to share their work. For this program, I will present several works by amateur and professional dancers that reveal the artist as both a performer and a person in a way that illuminates the purpose of dance in our lives as well as acknowledge the value of web as a venue.

–Boris Willis
Enjoy…

Matt Harding

Inspirational dance done by an amateur dancer who has a corporate sponsor.

Where the hell is matt/ 3:42/2006/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNF_P281Uu4

Soulja BoyTell’em

Example of social dancing on the web and an example of how dances get passed down from person to person. Soulja Boy also had a hit dance and song that was replicated on the web by many.

Do Da Stanky Leg/ 1:53/2009/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro0DCOxxG18&feature=related

Leili

Belly dancing- Raks Al Baladi an example of social dance on the web.

Iranian Girl/2:53/2009 http://vimeo.com/3391786

Conor Clarke

Conor and Matt get inspired and dance for fans of their sketch comedy show. Amateur performance made entertaining through the use of editing.

Dance/:52/2009 http://vimeo.com/2529997

Dance2/2:18/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPuh3Th-MmQ

Emma Noel

A response dance that shows the power of editing as well as show the differences in movement styles.

http://vimeo.com/76701

Mike Long

Mike did a year long dance video project posting a video everyday for a year and dance in various locations mostly around where he lived in Hamilton, Canada. Mike is a DJ and humorist with a large youtube following.

Picture on the Wall/2:32/2009/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMJAtQ-hrIo&feature=channel_page

Nick “Fresh” Puzo

NickFreshAlive is a friend of Mike Long who was inspired by him to make a video series of his own. This was a dance he did on a dare to dance in a crowed bar in front of people.

Shake Shake Shake Shake/2:43/2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYkKqpKaFs&feature=channel_page

Click here to view the embedded video.

Melanie- Dance everywhere

Melanie creates video dances around the San Francisco area.

Tune G at Southside Park/1:29/2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti793fHZ-bM&feature=channel_page

Lee Atwell

Lee creates a dance video everyday inspired by butoh. She owns a yoga studio in Seattle.

Garden Shack/1:59/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjzcd8i6SRM&feature=channel_page

Liz Roncka

Liz makes a new dance video daily.

56/ 10:00/2009

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gesel Mason

Gesel has started to experiment with creating work specifically for video.

1 Thing/ 4:36/ 2009

Ashley A. Friend

Ashley combines typical vlogging or talking videos with dance. She is skilled as a dancer, choreographer and editor.

Dance and Clutter and Talk and Bathroom and Dog/8:38/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBsyaoXKo70&NR=1

Boris Willis- Danceaday
Some examples from my site danceaday.com

Colleen and Jaclyn/:22/ 2007http://blip.tv/file/230716/

Meryl /1:24/2007 http://blip.tv/file/852526/

Human Zoo/2:39/2007 http://blip.tv/file/270927/

Capitol Spring/ 2/1:26/ 2007 http://blip.tv/file/312988/

Splinter/ 1:09/2007 http://blip.tv/file/446973/

NYC Subway /1:04/2008 http://blip.tv/file/854614/

Prayer /1:11/2007/ http://blip.tv/file/368253/

Click here to view the embedded video.

Trolley People/ 1:04/2007 http://blip.tv/file/358980/

Given all the possibilities of dance on screen, choreographers for the camera have a multitude of ways to keep us astonished.  Fortunately, the creative interaction between film technique and dance are endless.  In the emerging field of Cinedance, filmmakers or video artists create works that use dance as raw material, and now, choreographic achievements are being made available to the video artist for artistic exploration.

At the last Kinetic Cinema screening on May 13th at Chez Bushwick, curator Victoria Murphy showed a video by Matt Tarr and Ami Ipapo entitled ‘Little Ease (Outside the Box)’ that was a screen adaptation of Elizabeth Streb’s iconic solo ‘Little Ease’. For the film version of the piece, Streb company member Ami Ipapo reconstructed the choreography off-stage in an urban landscape.  The choreography of the live piece on its own is powerful, but the film was able to capture more action and intensity in the piece. I felt more connected to the dancer by being able to hear her breathing, and see her minute facial expressions as she powerfully pushes through the movements. The film took me “inside the box” with the dancer, and I forgot that I was a voyeur watching a choreographed work, something that rarely happens when watching a live performance. My favorite element of this Cinedance was the artistry in editing together of the shots of choreography, which to me added a new specific cinematic “pulse” to Streb’s dance.

Fortunately, other dance icons are lending their choreographed works to video artists to create cinedances. For instance the Martha Graham Company recently released videos of several dances from Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra to be remashed and reedited by contestants in their Clytemnestra Remash Challenge. The contestants displayed a huge range of styles and approaches to remashing the choreographic material, and all of the contest entries are available for view on the Clytemenestra Remash Challenge website at http://clytemnestraproject.com.

I am a personal fan of taking choreographed works made for the stage out into the world to be performed, so I was very pleased to see so many  video artists take Martha Graham’s choreography and characters into new environments off stage.  To me, it made the characters more appealing and more passionate. As a result, I found myself enjoying and connecting with Graham’s work on another level.   The following submission was my personal favorite in the Remash Contest.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The winners of the Remash Contest for Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra have been announced.  Check out their videos and look at some of the other contestants as well. Voting is still open for the popular choice awards! Regardless of the winners, I am thrilled to see new film-makers responding to choreography and furthering the development of cinedance.

People all over the globe are now able to share and collaborate on artistic works over the Internet. Dance innovators would be wise to tap into these new possibilities and use today’s networked media technologies to make the works of dance masters more accessible. In so doing, like Martha Graham and Elizabeth Streb, they would ensure the cultural significance of their work over time, while also enabling to new works of art to be made and contributing to new developments in cinedance.

(re)Action by Victoria Murphy

At Victoria Murphy’s talk and screening at Kinetic Cinema last Wednesday, she proposed a set of terms and definitions for classifying and identifying different forms of dance on screen. Murphy’s lexicon had similarities and differences with other proposed frameworks for screendance that have been presented and discussed at various forums and conferences in recent years. There is no doubt that this kind of discussion and debate is extremely important for the development of the genre (or some would say art form), so I would like to point out some of the main theories that exist today, and discuss how they intersect and overlap.

Screendance, cinedance, videodance, dance film… Which term to use?

In most debates about dance on screen, the first question that pops up is what is this genre called? Many different terms are in use, and in some cases they point to different genres while others are a catchall word for all dance on screen.

I think one of the best explanations of the different terms in use is by Karen Pearlman of the Physical TV company in Australia. In her article, “A Dance of Definitions” published in RealTime Arts, an Australian-based art and media blog, Pearlman reported on the dialogue at the first Screendance Conference at the American Dance Festival in 2006 around a question she raised which was: “Is dance on screen a dance art, a cinema art or a visual art?” In her estimation many of the different terms used today describe specific mixtures of two or more of these art forms at play. For Pearlman, screendance is a catchall term which could include any combination of dance and movement with “film, video, new media, installation, and future media.” The other terms are more specific in their focus. Videodance “is based in the thinking of a video art maker, a performance art maker or a visual artist will have its effect through techniques, schools, theories and premises of those disciplines.” While dance for screen “prioritises dance as its central discipline [and] will foreground the composition and exhibition of the danced movement.”

Screendance Venn Diagram by Karen Pearlman

For Murphy’s Kinetic Cinema program “Is it Live or Is it Cinedance?” she focused primarily on work that fits within the definition of “cinedance”. For Pearlman, cinedance and the term dancefilm are the same thing. Here is her definition for the term:

A dancefilm that is working in the overlapping areas of cinema and dance will prioritise the directorial vision and emphasise the collaborative coordination of all of the elements of cinematic production from script to mise-en-scéne to sound mix.

Murphy elaborated on this definition a bit more, and named three essential elements that must be present in a work for her to consider it a “cinedance.”

1. It must be Art (as opposed to a film about art – a documentary, or a record of art – a recording of a performance.)
2. It is Poetic (generally wordless and journey oriented, as opposed to narrative driven, spoken-word, and destination oriented which would be a prosaic film).
3. It is centered around Movement or a moving body (this could include choreography that is made through editing).

Another defining characteristic of cinedance that many people consider  important, is that the work can only exist on screen, and is not replicable onstage or in a live performance setting.

Categorizing films

For her screening, Murphy presented a variety of films that ran the gamut of what what is often shown at dance film festivals. Some of these fit within her criteria of “cinedance” while others clearly did not, and still others could be considered close cousins.

Of the Heart

The first film she showed was “Of the Heart” directed by Douglas Rosenberg and Allen Kaeja and performed by David Dorfman and Lisa Race. A short duet set in a cornfield, with simple choreography and camera movement, “Of the Heart” was definitely movement-based art (unable to be replicated live and not about another work of art), and poetic in nature. In this film, all the criteria for a cinedance were clearly present.

The second piece Murphy showed was an excerpt from “Latcho Drom,” a film about the Romany people and their culture that journeys across eight countries. Murphy contended that this film was not a cinedance because it was primarily a documentary about culture, and therefore should be considered a work of cultural anthropology. There are some blurry lines here though, because the film has no narration, and most of the dance scenes were staged specifically for the film. Perhaps the main purpose of making the film was cultural anthropology, but the end result is quite poetic, artistic and movement-driven. It is understandable why a curator for the Dance on Camera Festival this year included an excerpt from this film in his program. Not only does it educate us about a beautiful and rare culture, it also seems to stand as a piece of art in its own right.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another genre that seems related to, but not exactly cinedance is the movie musical. Murphy showed two examples from this category: a dance number from the 2003 film “Chicago” and a song number from “Across the Universe” by Julie Taymor. In analyzing these films Murphy found them to be both music and movement-driven, which makes the cinedance distinction really exist in the eye of the beholder – dance film enthusiasts will see these numbers as dance-driven, while music-lovers will find them music-driven… Also, many musicals, including “Chicago” are narrative films with spoken language and a  prosaic structure. Murphy observed that the song and dance numbers in musicals are usually dream-like interludes that take place out of real time and space and have a poetic structure. For Murphy, movie musicals are hybrids, in that they are prosaic/narrative films with poetic interludes that could be considered cinedances.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why bother?

If you are obsessed with dance film, as I am, you probably notice dance pop up all the time in mainstream media – in commercials, music videos, movie musicals, experimental films, and even in the middle of sitcoms. All of these are established genres in which dance has and continue to thrives in today, so why bother establishing a separate category for dance film that no one knows about?

This is a debate that many dance artists and film-makers are engaged in, and it often comes back to one’s personal self-identification as an artist. Some makers come from visual arts backgrounds and have been drawn to dance and working with dancers, but they do not consider their work to be different from video art or experimental films. Some makers come from film backgrounds, and happen to specialize in making films with a lot of dance and choreography in them, but they call their work music videos, commercials, or musicals.

What has been emerging more recently is a strong contingent of makers from dance backgrounds as choreographers and performers turned film-makers and videographers. It is this this group of people that are very invested in claiming a genre of their own in which dance and movement is of primary importance. The trade off for this unwillingness to conform to already existing genres is that makers contend with a lack of recognition in the market and among audience members and funders. I believe that it is just a matter of time and persistence until the perfect conditions for a tipping point are in place, and screendance will break through into the common lexicon.

If we look at current trends in the cultural landscape, we can see that we are now living in a video age. All of the major art forms are being subsumed by this dominant medium of our time. Art museums must devote more and more space to video art, music videos are consumed more than the songs they are promoting, and dancers are starting to create work for video in conjunction with their performance work, or in some cases instead of. Video is an essential component of any marketing strategy today. To reach and sustain audiences, dance companies must make videos. Out of these practical reasons, dancers are also finding new artistic possibilities in the medium, and exploring all that a camera and editing has to offer.

We are still at the dawn of screendance. While it may seem like an obscure genre today, the ranks of artists working in the form are growing, and with them will come wider audiences and recognition. The names and terminology for the form will likely change, and the distinctions will become more clear, but what is certain is that this is a separate category of it’s own. Someday it will have its own body of theoretical knowledge, complete with its own Hitchcocks, Brandos and Lucas’s. Things are muddy now, but out of this apparent chaos will come form and shape, a process that Murphy, Pearlman and others are working hard to bring about.

(re)Action by Victoria Murphy

Next week, on May 13th at Kinetic Cinema, Victoria Murphy will present a provocative talk and screening in which she proposes a way to define and think about what cinedance is and is not.

“Videodance” “Screendance” “Dance for the Camera” “Cinedance”… These terms have been used interchangeably when referring to things that emerge at the crossroads of dance and media, including everything from concert dance that is videotaped, edited and shown to an audience; to films about famous dance companies, choreographers and dancers; to videos made by creating movement for the camera, then edited to create visual poetry and films that are choreographic in their structure, though the images do not include people that could remotely be construed as dancing.

Does it matter that these and other forms melding dance and media are clumped together under several terms used interchangeably? Is this an emerging art form? If so, what are the hallmarks of the form? What makes one thing a cinedance, another a documentary, another cultural anthropology, and another a form of experimental media which we have yet to name?

Featuring the work of: Matt Tarr and ami ipapo; Douglas Rosenberg and Allen Kaeja; and Victoria Murphy; among others.

Victoria Murphy is a cinedancemaker, dancer, media artist and actress. She is a member of The Living Theatre and has performed with jill sigman/thinkdance, the Alchemical Theatre, the Measured Breath Theatre Company, and is working with Cynthia Berkshire on a dance in development. Victoria is currently working on her second cinedance, (re)Action. She studied media production and computer animation at The New School, and has worked on feature and commercial film sets. Her day-job activities include tutoring dancers in Final Cut Pro.

KINETIC CINEMA

Chez Bushwick
304 Boerum St., Buzzer #11
Brooklyn, NY 11206
718.418.4405
Directions
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Kinetic Cinema is a co-presentation of Chez Bushwick and Pentacle’s Movement Media project, and happens on the second Wednesday of each month as part of a weekly dance, visual & media arts series at Chez Bushwick.

More info

(“Maybe we all dream to be………?” by T.A.G.San Francisco, shown at the March 25th Artist Salon with Jaki Levy)

At the last Artist Salon on March 25th at Chez Bushwick, Jaki Levy, a media artist and new media consultant, discussed dance work created specifically for the web. The question of the evening was: Why should artists make dance films specifically for the web? In short, making dance videos for the web is convenient, inexpensive, and relatively easy to do.  For dance works in progress, posting videos on the web allows artists to conduct “audience test screenings”  and get feedback.  Web videos also offer artists the ability to communicate and mix media in different ways.

Jaki Levy compiled a few videos that gave us a peek into the present + future of dance, art, and technology on the web.  Some of the work was completely choreographed, others were more improvisational.  Jaki shared how videos are created for different purposes, and gave examples of what a digital performance world looks like, including live web casts, web series, and site specific performances.

For example, Tendu.TV is looking for a mass market for dance by offering high quality broadband content of dance concerts and dance for camera works. Jaki showed an example of a show produced for Tendu.TV by Marlon Barrios-Solano entitled “Dance-tech Ep. 1“. In this episode Marlon interviewed various international choreographers talking about their work and intercut the footage with excerpts from their New York performance seasons.

Troika Ranch was exploring a process of editing for their up-coming multi-media show, “Loop Diver”and shared it with their MySpace friends.  This process is called “Algorithmic editing” and it assaults the senses. In this experiment (a collaboration between Troika Ranch and Street Pictures), a simple phrase of movement is fractured into thousands of shots in various locations all over Brooklyn, New York.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3rd Rail Projects & Julie Fotheringham both used web video  to share their site specific performances with wider audiences. 3rd Rail Projects fully integrated  web activities into their recent month long performance series at the World Financial Center by posting videos online and writing about each day’s performance on their blog. In this way, the work had both an online life and a physical life that co-existed and supported each other.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Julia Fotheringham makes guerilla-style dances that interrupt normal routines and cause people to stop and observe. The video is both a document and a voyeuristic view of the performer’s journey through the city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“A Facet of the Real” explored how performance in “first” life and Second Life can intersect, creating a trippy situation in which a live performance is viewed in real time by online avatars in a virtual venue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some artists make web videos for artistic purposes, others for marketing purposes, and some have both in mind.  The intention of web videos can be to develop audiences by hooking viewers online and enticing them to come to live shows or screenings, or to simply to post a personal video diary from the studio. The web space allows for both anonymous and public modalities and is as broad and rich as the physical world. What is exciting is how dance artists are starting to embrace the web for all its potential. It feels increasingly apparent that we are all media-makers now.

To see all the clips from the screening and read more commentary go to Jaki’s blog post at: http://www.arrowrootmedia.com

by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse

Still of Kristin Sloan, creator of NYC Ballet's "Tragic Love" web series

At the next Artist Salon on March 25th at Chez Bushwick, Jaki Levy, founder of Arrow Root Media and new media producer for Misnomer Dance, Martha Graham Dance Co. and others, will be looking at dance work created specifically for the web. Dance on Camera has already established itself as a viable medium for showcasing dance + performance. However, there is a growing trend of artists creating and adapting work specifically for the web. For example, New York City Ballet’s Tragic Love series, or more recently, Cedar Lake’s  Project 52 – all videos made specifically for the web.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Like site specific work, these (web)site specific pieces are showing that these new constraints are creating short format work, with new possibilities for distribution, creativity, and collaboration.

You are invited bring in your own examples of web-based videos to show at the Salon. If interested, please contact Jaki at http://www.google.com/search?q=jaki+levy

The Artist Salon series happens on the fourth Wednesdays of the month at Chez Bushwick and features dialogue across disciplines around various artist-chosen topics. Anyone can bring questions, stories, artifacts, or material to add to the conversation.

ARTIST SALON

“Dance for Web” moderated by Jaki Levy

Wed. March 25, 2009 @ 7pm $5