Screendance Centre

Since January 2012, the former Screendance Network has new beginnings as the Centre for Screendance. Traces of the Network remain in The International Journal of Screendance (with Volume 2 out in early 2012), memories of the Screendance Symposium (Brighton, 4 February 2011), and a group’s desire to continue creating opportunities for artists, academics, educators and students to engage with critical dialogues about screendance’s past, present and future.
The idea of the Network was developed by Claudia Kappenberg (University of Brighton), Doug Rosenberg (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Katrina McPherson (formerly Dundee University). Their work included a successful bid to the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council for “Network Funding” and in April 2009 the Screendance Network officially began.

The Network’s goal was simple: to create a research forum for critical debate and publication on screendance.

The Network also aimed to foster dialogue with adjacent fields of practice and enquiry and invited scholars such as Professor Ian Christie, (Birkbeck, University of London UK), Professor Noel Carroll (Temple University, USA) and Catherine Wood, Curator (Tate Modern UK) to contribute at different stages of the project.

In December 2011 and after two years of debates and activities the Network – Claudia Kappenberg, Sarah Whatley, Doug Rosenberg Harmony Bench, Ann Cooper-Albright, Marisa Zanotti and Simon Ellis – held its final meeting, and these seven will now contribute to the work of the Centre for Screendance, alongside other artists, scholars and students.

The Centre for Screendance – hosted by the University of Brighton – will in the first instance continue the Network’s aims by overseeing the publication of The International Journal of Screendance. The group will also seek funding to develop a range of additional projects that attempt to provoke screendance practitioners, researchers and curators around the world. We will look to advance debates around screendance, and welcome a range of screendance practices that might include experimental film techniques, visual arts influences, research approaches and radical choreographic thinking.

The Centre also publishes news, a blog and relevant events, conferences and papers.