• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Dance on Screen This page intentionally left blank Dance on Screen Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art Sherril Dodds Lecturer in Dance Studies Department of Dance Studies University of Surrey © Sherril Dodds 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-4039-4145-9 ISBN 978-0-230-50958-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230509580 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dodds, Sherril, 1967– Dance on screen : genres and media from Hollywood to experimental art / Sherril Dodds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Dance in motion pictures, television, etc. I. Title. GV1779 .D63 2001 791.43’655—dc21 00–069217 10987654321 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 For Hazel and Dick Dodds This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Plates ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xv 1 Dance on Screen: A Contextual Framework 1 Visual culture in the late twentieth century 1 Histories of dance on screen 4 Screen dance and critical perspectives 16 A focus on screen dance practitioners 22 The live body and the screen body: a technical comparison 29 2 Images of Dance in the Screen Media 36 Hollywood dance films: popular representations of dance 37 Television advertising and dancing bodies 44 Dance and pop music video: a musicology of the image 49 The translation of theatre dance to screen 56 Early dance for the camera 62 3 Video Dance: Televisualizing the Dancing Body 68 An introduction to video dance 68 Manipulating the dancing body on screen 71 Choreographic content in video dance 80 The dance of the camera and the cut 89 4 Postmodern Dance Strategies on Television 95 Dance, television and postmodernism 95 Breaking the realist code 98 Fragmented narratives and episodic structures 106 The performing body 113 Seizing the spectator’s eye 120 5 Hybrid Sites and Fluid Bodies 126 Video dance and hybridity 126 Video dance, television advertising and music video 127 The consumer body and the promotional network 135 vii viii Contents Discourses of technology: the technophobic and the technophilic 146 The mechanical body 153 The digital body 159 The fluid body: transgression and disruption 169 Appendix: List of Works Discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 175 Notes 177 Bibliography 186 Index 194 List of Plates 1 Hands Choreographer: Jonathan Burrows, Director: Adam Roberts, 1996 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 2 Alistair Fish Choreographer: Aletta Collins, Director: Tom Cairns, 1995 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 3 Touched Choreographer: Wendy Houstoun, Director: David Hinton, 1995 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 4 Drip Choreographer: Matthew Bourne, Director: Frances Dickenson, 1996 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 5 Dwell Time Choreographer: Siobhan Davies, Director: David Buckland, 1996 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 6 Storm Choreographer: Aletta Collins, Director: Tom Cairns, 1996 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 7 Man Act Choreographers: Man Act, Director: Mike Stubbs, 1996 © Arts Council of England and BBC Television 8 boy Choreographer: Rosemary Lee, Director: Peter Anderson, 1996 © Photograph: Margaret Williams, MJW Productions 9 Spectre de la Rose Choreographer: Lea Anderson, Director: Margaret Williams, 1994 © Photograph: Margaret Williams, MJW Productions ix This page intentionally left blank Preface In writing this book I hope to offer the reader an opportunity to delve into the wealth and breadth of dance practices on screen. The material for the book came out of my doctoral research (Dodds, 1997) but my interest in the screen media has a much longer history. As an under- graduate student I was introduced to the art films of Peter Greenaway, in particular Drowning by Numbers (1988). The film is less concerned with action-driven narrative than with an opulent visual play. Not only do a series of quirky games litter the plot, but Greenaway also inscribes the film with puns, jokes and witty references. The screen is like a canvas for pastoral images in which corpses, fireworks and num- bers are integrated into the landscape. What struck me was the pri- macy of formal structuring devices and compositional concerns. During my MA studies, video became an essential tool for studying dance irrespective of its ephemeral nature or geographical locality. The easy accessibility of video allowed me to see Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s radical reworking of Swan Lake (1987) with its bald-headed, flat-footed swans. It was also during this period that I became aware of how the screen could take dance out of the theatre into alternative locations and new environments. Over and over again I watched the radical juxtaposition of people and settings in Pina Bausch’s The Lament of the Empress (1989): a man carrying a wardrobe across a field; a bunny girl stumbling over ploughed land; and a woman sitting smoking on an armchair in the middle of a busy highway. Similarly, Lea Anderson’s Perfect Moment (1992) introduced me to the versatility that the camera could bring to dance through constructing images that could only exist on screen. As a student I was intrigued by these multi- ple platforms for dance, especially with regard to how the screen opened up new choreographic possibilities. It is not just dance that fascinates me. I am an avid spectator of all forms of screen media: reruns of The Simpsons, the latest Woody Allen film or just browsing around the World Wrestling Federation web site. It is this vocabulary of popular and art media images that informs how I look at dance on screen. Unfortunately, at present there is a lack of scholarly writing on the subject. Although a clutch of referee journal articles and features in popular magazines are in print, there is a dearth of reference texts that deal with the area of screen dance. The most xi xii Preface recent is Parallel Lines: Media Representations of Dance (Jordan and Allen, 1993). This anthology provides a valuable collection of articles on a diverse range of subjects; however, since its publication there has been a proliferation of dance works made specifically for the screen, an area which is only touched upon in Parallel Lines. I sense this situation might change, however. As a field of academic study, dance on screen is rapidly evolving. I am increasingly coming into contact with other scholars interested in this area and there are numerous students keen either to write dissertations on the subject or else to create their own dance films. Promising developments are taking place in higher educa- tion. A number of departments now run modules or courses in ‘dance in the media’ or ‘dance technology’ and this type of institutional recog- nition firmly places screen dance within a scholarly framework. This comment is not intended to undermine or disregard the artistic context out of which screen dance emerges; rather it is a call for a critical dia- logue that can allow practitioners, students and scholars to analyse, interpret and evaluate this rich field of dance practice. It therefore appears to be a prime time for a text devoted to the sub- ject of dance on screen. This book sets out to provide a comprehensive introduction to the diversity of screen dance forms through cultural, economic, critical, artistic, historical, technical and theoretical perspec- tives. Although the book primarily addresses images of dance on film and television, in acknowledgement of the related and rapidly expand- ing area of digital screen dance, developments in this field form a small part of the discussion. Chapter 1 commences with an overview of the cultural context in which contemporary screen dance is situated, and considers some of the different rationales and approaches to putting dance on screen. It traces the historical developments of the field, from the early flickering dance films at the beginning of the century, through the advent of television, to the recent experimentation between dance and digital media. This lineage is followed by an exam- ination of the current artistic context in which screen dance is located, contrasting the writings of dance critics with the views of screen dance practitioners. To bring this chapter to a close, a technical examination of the ‘screen’ is undertaken to provide the groundwork for the case studies that follow. Chapter 2 offers some rich examples of the field in practice in order to address the diverse ways in which the screen media have dealt with the dancing body. The chapter begins at the commer- cial end of screen dance by looking at 1980s Hollywood dance films, television advertising and music video. From this consumerist imagery the remainder of the chapter turns to art dance on television.

Load more

  15

Copy Link