Dr Claudia Kappenberg returns as guest editor to the journal she founded
06 Dec 2016
Screendance is a multidisciplinary field; a fairly young critical discourse that explores artistic practices and discourses which draw on both choreography and cinematography.
This special issue of the International journal of Screendance is guest edited by Dr Claudia Kappenberg, University of Brighton, with Sarah Whatley from Coventry University. It is dedicated to All This Can Happen - a collaboration between choreographer Siobhan Davies and film-maker David Hinton, based on Robert Walser’s novella The Walk from 1917. The film had its first public screening at Dance Umbrella, London’s international dance festival, on the 13 October 2012. Since then, the work has been screened internationally, reviewed in dance and film journals and online, and been the subject of a symposium at the Freie Universität Berlin. This issue of the International Journal of Screendance builds on this extensive circulation, and dedicates, for the first time in the history of the journal, a whole issue to one work of art. In this way, different voices and perspectives are gathered around one focal point. Besides enriching our understanding of the work in question, this commonality of focus serves to highlight the extraordinary richness of dialogues that occur in Screendance.
The issue opens with a literary contribution by writer and curator of film Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery, London UK); Jürgen Simpson, curator of Light Moves (Limerick, IE) draws on relevant scholarship of W.G. Seabald; Erin Brannigan (Senior Lecturer at University of New South Wales, AUS) and Cleo Mees (PhD researcher, Macquarie University AUS) engage in a conversation about choreographic strategies; German scholar Maren Butte explores the act of walking as a fragile bodily movement and leitmotif of both Walser’s The Walk and ATCH; Florence Freitag, screendance artist and convener of the Berlin Symposium, draws on Maya Deren’s terminology of film as unstable equilibrium; Assistant Professor of Film Studies in Connecticut Ross Morin argues for a psychological reading of the work in view of research into posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Nicolas Villodre, an expert on experimental cinema from the Cinémathèque de la Danse in Paris, provides a rich film-historical perspective; Simon Roloff, Junior Professor for Creative Writing at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, mines the historical context to draw parallels between the visual patterns and narrative of the film and the constraints of modernity in and around 1900; Siobhan Davies and David Hinton are in conversation with Claudia Kappenberg and explore the detailed experiments, inspirations and ideas that informed the project; the issue concludes with the reprint of three reviews of All This Can Happen from the wider press, by Sukhdev Sandu, Sanjoy Roy and Priscilla Guy, as well as a postscript by Prof. Sarah Whatley.
The editors hope that the issue demonstrates the extraordinary complexities and potential of screendance practices, as well as the diversity of scholarship which screendance affords. The extent and intensity of the discussions in this special issue is in itself a testimony to Siobhan Davies and David Hinton’s remarkable collaboration, artistry, and craft. The film is likely be a marker and milestone in the evolution of screendance and its canon, and will be referred to time and again, both through the work of subsequent screendance makers and in the discourses around the practice.
Editors: Harmony Bench and Simon Ellis
A brief history of the Journal:
The International journal of Screendance was founded in 2010 by Dr Claudia Kappenberg (University of Brighton) and Prof. Douglas Rosenberg (University of Madison-Wisconsin) with research funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. Originally printed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison it is now hosted by Ohio State University and has become an online journal. The editorial lead is rotating, currently held by Dr Harmony Bench, Assistant Professor of Dance History and Theory (Ohio State University), and Dr Simon Ellis (Coventry University, UK). As original founder-editor Dr Kappenberg now curates and edits special issues.
The first four issues can be downloaded free
The latest issue (Vol 6, 2016) of The International Journal of Screendance is online.
Access is free. Essays are downloadable in both HTML and PDF formats.
