Seminar 2
The Screendance Network's second seminar was held between 14 and 16 January 2010 in Coventry and hosted by Professor Sarah Whatley, the new Co-Investigator of the research group. This was timed to allow the third seminar to take place in the US in Summer 2010, to coincide with the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
All members of the Network were able to attend. The plan for the second seminar was for all members to present research on individually chosen topics, which had been identified during the first seminar in Brighton in September 2009. The emphasis was therefore on group debate and no other formal presentations had been scheduled, to allow for maximum time for the group to share their research.
A very brief video documentation of the presentations and topics covered, created by Claudia Kappenberg, can be viewed below:
Report on the second Seminar of the Screendance Network
14 - 16 January 2010, Coventry, UK
Thursday 14 January, 5.00pm
All members gathered for a reception and Professor Sarah Whatley opened the seminar with a presentation of her previous AHRC project, the creation of a digital archive for the extensive body of work of British choreographer Shiobhan Davies. Professor Whatley raised, for example, the need of user feedback to identify how such enterprises benefit the user and how they may impact on the perception of choreography or screendance. This also raised questions on how to represent Screendance in future online archives and what modes of engagement a website could offer. This was followed by a shared dinner.
Friday 15 January, 10.00am–6.00pm
The first presentation was by Harmony Bench, exploring Twitter as a site for performance. Harmony introduced a number of online projects such as the Clytemnestraproject.com, Yoko Ono’s tweets and D.T.W 'Twitter Community Choreography'. Harmony described Twitter performance as site-specific Screendance, as choreography without performers and as textual performance. Twittters are screens without playback, screens in which text is the medium. Twitter projects build on crowd sourcing for proliferation and distribution. Twitter was discussed as an open medium, which allows for the private as well as the mundane and the institutional, for transmission of information, conceptual art or comic strips. It was discussed to what extend tweets could be compared with haiku’s, or if they are more open and incomplete as fragments compared with the poetic form of the Haiku. See Harmony’s twrp at twitter.com/TWRPerformance.
The second presentation was given by Chirstinn Whyte, who was investigating the notion of an outside of Screendance. Chirstinn spoke first about the difference of writing as an academic discipline and writing as critical engagement from a practitioner’s point of view. She then described a process of viewing and reviewing 30 moving image works in 30 days, including films by Jeffrey Jones, Lyn Ramsey, Peter Gidal, Wim Vandekeybus and Norman M Laren. Writing was discussed as descriptive approach to a work, as a different kind of choreographic enterprise, as a possible re-enactment and also as writing about the space, which is left behind, when the film or video is taken away.
After lunch, Ann Cooper Albright presented research into the notion of falling and its representation in moving image work and the media. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing about the linguistic proximity of ‘penser’ (to think) and peser (to weigh), Ann explored the moment of fall as a gap in which new meaning can arise. Meaning is here seen as both open and weighty. Ann also described a change in the representation of falling during the last few decades and illustrated this through the screening of work such as Bas Jan Ader’s video performances and Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton’s exploration of gravity in contact improvisation (70s), LaLaLa Human Steps (80s), and the catastrophic media images of 9/11. The increase of virtuosity in falling over the decades was discussed and possible differences between terms such as leap, jump and fall were raised. The problematics of a discourse on falling after 9/11 was also addressed.
Marisa Zanotti explored modes of spectatorship that are produced through moving image works. Marisa spoke of the work of Claire Denis and the sensuality of her filmic image. Marisa also screened an excerpt of Martin Scorsese’s work and discussed the particular visual and sound architecture of this material and if it can be described as “choreographic”. The films raised questions about the role of sensation in viewing experience, on the body as a laboratory of experience, on the notion of exchange between image and spectator, and the relation between knowledge and embodied experience. The term embodiment was also discussed.
The day concluded with a discussion on the proposed Journal of Screendance. The group decided to dedicate the first issue of the journal to the research of AHRC Network and agreed on a timeline for the completion of articles by its members. Other sections were agreed such as book and video reviews, transcripts of interviews, individual bibliographies and recommendations and visual pages, which addressed for example the creative processes of Screendance. Doug presented the design he had developed with Wisconsin University for an online version of the journal. It was agreed that the group would aim to run its third seminar in conjunction with the ADF in North Carolina in June 2010 and also launch the first issue at the ADF. In addition to an online issue there would also be a special hard copy available of the first Issue, for both the ADF and the dance conference in Surrey in July. Postcards needed to be printed, also for a Screendance event in London on 10 February.
Saturday 16 January, 10.00am–4.30pm
Kyra Norman presented an overview of her PhD research into the Screen as a site for Choreography. Kyra described her own experience of creative modes of documentation and the questions this raised for her. She also listed examples she will be discussing in her writing, including case studies of works by Becky Edmunds, Lucy Cash and Augusto Corrieri, and raised issues such as choreography, cinematography and forms of writing, space, place, location and site; and filmmaking as an engagement with actual space, with the space inside the camera and with the space of the screen. A discussion ensued about the richness of a distinction between space and site. The question of a wider visual art context was raised, to situate Screendance practices within existing traditions of moving image work.
Doug Rosenberg presented research into the excavating of genres for screendance to address the lack of curatorial frameworks in the field. He argued for curatorial activism in order to challenge and expand on existing platforms. Doug presented a number of graphs, placing work along axis such as film versus dance and narrative versus poetic. He also raised notions such repetition, landscape and intertextuality, to suggest possible distinct fields of practice. The viewing of video work raised debates as to different possible readings of work and the need for more detailed critical reviews in the field. The lack of critical feedback for filmmakers was noted. The how and why of choreographic languages was raised, as was a lack of clarity in narrative strategies. A tendency to create Screendance works vaguely infused with narrative was noted, whereby dance conventions possibly hinder directorial clarity. Conventions in the relation of choreography to site was addressed, whereby sites often function as the provider of narrative frameworks for aesthetic purposes.
The last contribution was by Claudia Kappenberg, who presented a series of videos in alternation with texts drawn from Craig Owens and Nadia Seremetakis. Borrowing from a visual arts discourse Claudia explored the notion of appropriation and the use of allegory in contemporary moving image work, arguing that Screendance is very much rooted in these discourses without however making much use of its creative possibilities. In the discussion work from David Hinton was compared with that of Klaus vom Bruch and Christian Marclay. Methodologies such as repetition and seriality were debated and the possible multiple readings of work such as vom Bruch’s ‘The West is alive’ were articulated.
The seminar concluded with a review of the timeline for the launch of the first issue at the ADF in the summer and with a discussion on the focus of the third seminar. Following the completion of a series of essays by its members and in view of the second issue of the Journal, it was agreed that all would be selecting an existing article or essay on or related to debates in Screendance. The discussions of the third seminar would centre on possible modes of critique in Screendance, in view of Noel Carroll’s recent publication On Criticism.