On Tuesday I received a few more amazing comments on my post “A Wiki barn-raising for videodance.” Those, along with all the other comments I’ve received thus far, have sparked a conversation that is fueling the growth and advancement of this form. This dialogue among all members of the community – new and old, experienced and novice, amateur and professional, viewer and artist – is exactly what I hoped to achieve with this blog. If I appear to have any sort of agenda, I hope this is it: I want to see videodance flourish both on small scales and large scales, above ground and underground, be made and enjoyed by all people. Ultimately this vision is a subsidiary of my greater hope, which is to help move dance as a whole into a position of greater prominence, participation, and presence in the cultural landscape.

What is so exciting (and perhaps frightening) about these times is that hopeless idealists like myself have at their disposal one of the biggest social networking platforms ever: the internet. Like everyone else, I’m just experimenting with what one can do with this incredibly powerful tool, but what continually amazes me is how quickly things can manifest here. A week ago when I posted “A Wiki barn-raising for videodance” I was wondering where does the average person go to find out information? How can we make ourselves (this community and art form) more available and accessible to this person? Already my call has been answered, and news is spreading throughout the established videodance community. I am thrilled about this, and to hear that it will be addressed at the next Opensource:{video-dance} 2007 Symposium in Scotland. Details about this fantastic gathering of artists, academics, curators and producers can be found at the Video Dance Forum Blog.

This form (videodance/screendance/dance film/whatever you call it) has been around for a long time, and was present at the very birth of the motion picture. I don’t know at what point in history practitioners of the form became aware of what they were doing as a separate facet of film from other genres. This moment is shrouded in mystery for me and I would love to know if anyone out there that has done the research has an answer. It seems to me that the key to our future and our ability to tell the world what we do is to know our origins. This is why I wanted to propose to the community to create an article on Wikipedia. Right now I see many new people encountering videodances and becoming curious about this form. It is a wonderful thing to see, however I also see many of them unaware of the legacy of the form, especially when they pick up a video camera and start to experiment themselves, innocently trying to reinvent the wheel.

I’m very grateful for the comments I’ve received and the great suggestions proposed. I encourage you all to go to the Wikipedia article I’ve started and make your edits! If we all chip in with our knowledge, research, and connections we can build a comprehensive, informative, and educational article of great value both to our established community and new people just encountering the form. I’m sure there is much debate and hashing out of ideas still to be done, but I look forward to joining the dance and seeing where this moves us all.

With great respect and thanks,
Anna

Let the shindig begin!

Briefly, I’m happy to announce that I’ve framed out an article about Videodance on Wikipedia. The barn-raising has begun! It is by no means finished, but at least the basic foundation and frame is there. Please help put up some posts and beams in there! You can just nail in a shingle, or board up the whole outside. Whatever you feel inspired to do is wonderful.

Some info and tips about using Wikipedia:
As Shosana of Dancespiration observed, Wikipedia is a complicated beast. First you will need to register and sign all your rights away to any material you put up there, and then you need to promise that you will not plagiarize or use anyone else’s content without their consent. Even then that may not be good enough, so just get used to screen after screen of expository legalese as you first get initiated to the Wiki program.  All this is in the name of the free-flow of information, so it’s cool…

Then, when you get initiated, you can edit any material you want,
however you will need to get used to their formatting system which is a
form of text code. I recommend keeping their tutorial window open as you go about making your first edit. It will save much time and frustration.

When you go to the Videodance article you will see at the bottom that I classified it as a “stub“.
This means that it is an incomplete article in need of expansion. You
can just click on that line to get to an edit window for the whole
article, or you can click on the [edit] links at the end of every
section in the article.  We should keep the article classified as a
stub for a while until it is completely constructed and decked out with
references, notes and links. Once she’s roofed and shingled then we can
have a good ole contra dance!

 
“Barn Dance” from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

It
is good to internally link to any names or items that may have articles
in Wikipedia (many things do, so just use the [[double brackets]] and
preview to see if it links). If it does it will show up as blue, if not
it will show up as red.  Also, if you state a fact, they like it if you
provide an end note and reference your source at the bottom under
“Notes”.  Any external links you make should also be listed at the
bottom under “Links”.

Oy, now after all this defining and polemical thought, I’ve got to go study my media management coursework… No rest for the weary, but I’m feeling productive today!

If you are interested in learning about something where do you go first? In my case and for millions of others, we look it up on Wikipedia. Just about everything in the known universe that anyone has ever cared to think about is there. Being a user-generated site, the more interest there is in a subject the more comprehensive the Wikipedia articles on it will be. And the theory goes that this makes their encyclopedia more trust-worthy, up-to-date, and objective than any other reference source around, because it’s constantly being checked and edited by its users.

So I decided to look up my area of interest which is videodance.  Immediately I ran into a problem, because while I call this genre videodance, there are at least 5 other names it is known by (see my first entry “What’s in a Name” for further discussion on this dilemma).

I decided to go with my first pick anyway, and I looked up videodance. Results: One entry for the Thessaloniki Video Dance Festival in Greece. That’s cool, but it only tells me about one festival of about 150 that show videodance work. I still don’t know what videodance is. At the bottom of that entry the only link for further information is the film festival’s official website. I’d hit a dead end.

Now my cockles were up. Do so few people care about this type of work that there is only one article on Wikipedia, and it’s not even about the art form, it’s a promotional blurb for a film festival? Why is there no information about this genre which is as old as film itself, has a huge and illustrious body of work from some of the world’s most prestigious filmmakers and choreographers, and could possibly revolutionize the entire art form of dance for the 21st Century?!

Before spontaneously combusting, I looked up the other known names for the genre (dance film, screendance, cinedance, kinodance, dance for camera). These also produced very poor results. “Dance film” and “Dance for camera” were the only searches that came up with any real articles and they both seemed to be written by single authors who have very obvious
agendas.

OK, my mission was becoming clear. It was time to put my wiki where my mouth is!

I’m proposing a Wikipedia barn-raising for videodance.

We need to get some info up there and quick!  I will start an article on “videodance” and post a link to it here on this blog. I encourage every one of you who has ever worked in this form, or had an opinion about it to comment here with your suggestions and thoughts. Once the article is started please go up there and edit it (or start one under your own genre name of choice, but be sure to link to the others), share your
knowledge and keep this going until we get a full, comprehensive, coherent, evolving, and useful set of articles up there that anyone with a spark of interest in this subject can refer to and get some answers.

Please help raise this art form up and spread the word!

As inspiration, below is one of my favorite videodances which always puts a smile on my face and reminds me of why I think this genre is so f***king phenonemal…

“Weapon of Choice” Fat Boy Slim, dir. Spike Jonze