ACKNOWLEDGING AUDIENCES

Curating the audience:

In all its variety of forms and expressions, dance on film, screendance, Moving image, Videodanza, Cinedans, et al, is celebrated and exhibited worldwide at over 45 specialist Dance Film Festivals every year from Anchorage to Athens.

Dance and Screen have been so inextricably linked since the beginnings of cinema that audiences and even many dance makers almost take them for granted.
Perhaps this familiarity contributes to why the dance film ‘genre', in relation to other cinematic endeavour, continues to dwell in a paradoxical twilight world of over-practice and under-development. This conflict certainly contributes to a significant underpowering of its potential as a singular creative medium. Certainly these developmental conflicts impoverish in the growth medium required for a nascent critical language or a coherent means by which to set in place uncontentious qualitative criteria.

Historically, dance on film has developed in a series of fruitful parallel paths. These range from late 19th century silent animations, through acclaimed and much lauded populist movie musicals, simultaneous with the making of less renowned but nonetheless important experimental "moving-image"-on-film work. All of this leavened by periodic and occasionally successful forays in documenting many aspects of the above.

Many alternative directions have been progenitors for the work increasingly found in art galleries, interractive choreographic design, video backdrops for live performance projects and a host of other creative manifestations. They form the bedrock of what is arguably regarded as the avant-garde of contemporary-dance based dancefilm, “post-modern” moving–image video and film work, and "Not", "Post" or even, "Un"-Choreography.

This includes but is not limited to physio-kinetics, animation techniques, plasma-based movement-triggered clairvoyant technologies and audience controlled outcome projects, inter alia.
All of the areas of creative endeavour outlined above, overlap according to the tools of choice for the dancefilm and moving-image maker, irrespective of the languages and iconography with which they choose to work.

Whilst acknowledging the inherent value of the edgier, intellectually and emotionally demanding innovations as unimpeachable standard bearers for the avant-garde, and even trend-setters for the vanguard, it often appears that the prodigious and often incontinent outpourings of "Moving Image" work allied to an ongoing clamour for attention by the "new" has engendered a consequential skewing of support down a cul-de-sac of creative innovation for its own sake.

Too often innovation merely abjures artists from taking responsibility for accessibility, measurable demonstrations of skills or even acknowledging that public funding processes should require accountability and statutorily scrutinised representation across a complete creative gestalt. These are the necessary checks and balances which avoid the cultural dangers of colonisation by vociferous, self-referential and occasionally militantly mediocre minorities.

Dance film makers of every creative inclination have learned much from the clash between Hollywood commercial imperatives which drove the inventive, if overblown, creations of Busby Berkley, Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse and Powell and Pressburger, etc

Setting aside the vestiges of camp and banality however, these old-school film choreographic outings have much to offer in the essential qualities of breadth of cinematic vision and quality in choreographic expertise - to a great extent, some of the key DNA strands of “Dancefilm”.

Making “new” art and forging ahead with an avant-garde requires breaking the rules. Breaking them however, requires prior experience and an understanding of why and how they evolved and a firm grasp of their existence and function.

Irrespective of medium or message, presentational art forms by definition, are those created for presentation; whether they exist for the purposes of entertainment, enlightenment, education, the elevation of the condition humaine or just stashed under the stairs with The Borrowers as conceptual art; even, perish the thought, the fascistic and bourgeois banalities known collectively as “decorative" arts .

In such a context, audiences for the dance film form deserve to expect basic “rules” such as notions of Aristotlean unity. They might be allowed to anticipate a deliberate and skilled avoidance of poorly articulated or ill-considered visual metaphor.
Moreover, within an art form based on specific sets of technologies and technical expertise, a sine qua non for all practitioners within the snythetically nominated artform known as "dance-film", should be a demonstrable grasp of the fundamentals of camera choreography and cinematic craft-skills.

Creative parameters and an agreed set of nostrums for the exercise in achieving quality thresholds, provide a contextual landscape within which to set a wider set of frames of reference and enable deeper penetration to the heart of every art form. This is a necessary process akin to assisting children to develop the skills to separate colour spectra in order to avoid daubing everything standard, kindergarten grey-brown.
All of the forgoing the better to facilitate the entry-skills required to make meaning of no matter what profundity and accessibility, through the myriad set of possible abstract forms, ideas, or narrative and conceptual devices available to every artist.

Encouragingly there is a glimmer of a sense of a wider, and less and less exclusive “dancefilm” making community.
One in which young dancemakers from all dance disciplines are increasingly interested and are becoming sufficiently humble to learn more about the processes involved in film making, whilst bringing ever wider and diverse elements of choreographic design to the processes, prior to unloading otherwise often unformed ouevres upon an unsuspecting world.

Affordable cine-clone and digital video technology, currently allows potential dancefilm makers at every level, the opportunity endlessly to experiment in how to achieve a complete and satisfactory synthesis of the skills outlined above, with minimal expertise and at almost nil cost but time.

Thanks to instant online, free Flash-conversion technology, and ever ready supplies of highly trained and inevitably “available” dancers, short dancefilms can be storyboarded, choreographed, cast, shot, edited and distributed online in fractions of the time, cost and resources previously required.

There now need to be more facilities of a less rarified, exclusive and scholastic structure put in place to build confidence, knowledge and platforms for mentors and teachers with a broader set of cinematic, directorial and choreographic skills and aesthetics.

Those who possess real-world experience, style, expertise and the generosity coherently and freely to share broad cinematic and choreographic knowledge-bases, without the requirement to adhere to particular stylistic fetishes. Importantly we need to free the making of dancefilm and the making of meaning in Moving Image from the fetters of requirement to be part of completing creatively inconsequential, and intellectually lightweight academic theses as part of justifying and maintaining highly-subsidised pedagogic tenures.

There needs to exist a common ground and language to foster ideas of how to develop clearly articulated cinematic and choreographic ideas and design and a more clearly defined collective disinclination to allow the immature, incompetent and jejeune to continue to grow up on the paid-up time of audiences.

Future technology and audience development:

The advent of boutique digital cinemas in most of the local regional arts centres, means that ever increasing exhibition and audience development opportunities now exist.

At the risk of a blinding glimpse of the obvious, in order for a true evolution of Dance-Film, the primary need is to facilitate resources to exhibit an ever wider spectrum of dance on film, in ever more accessible forms, far more often, to far more people.

Allied to the power of accessible and inexpensive marketing channels, including increasingly, the online world, inevitably this will open up a wider and more informed critical debate and expose audiences to the possibilities of dance film across a broad horizon.

In time, a virtuous circle of greater awareness, focused marketing, steady income and support from developing ever broader audience bases and the ensuing motivation and resources for ongoing productivity from all areas of the “dance” and “moving-image” world will logically follow.

Dance on film will never supercede live dance. Film, while exciting and stimulating for many reasons, cannot replicate the unique, tangible frisson that can occur between well-made live performances and their audiences.

Dancefilm, however, possesses all of the potential to speak to audiences in an utterly different and satisfying way, which Andrei Tarkovski uniquely describes as the “poetics of cinema”.

Our task as dance film practitioners of every creative hue and inclination, over the coming years, is to work together more generously to find a common language in which to speak with and to our several, different but nonetheless equally important constituent practitioners, audiences and critics and strive to cross fertilise our activities at every opportunity.

We must be vociferous in urging all those interested and involved in dance on film, whether practitioner or audience to support these endeavours and be rigorously interrogative of the motives and imperatives of those who demonstrate a disinclination so to do.

Sandy Strallen
The London International Dancefilm Festival