Video Dance: Televisualizing the Dancing Body

It is suggested in Chapter 1 that, although there has been a multitude of stage dance performances translated to the screen, it is apparent that there are difficulties with regard to this process. The live experience is a completely different phenomenon to dance that is located within a screen context. There is also a history of artistic tension between choreographers and directors in relation to adapting dance for television. Previously, this resulted from a lack of familiarity with the codes and conventions of each other’s medium (Rubidge, 1993). Yet, even now, when choreographers and directors are experienced in translating dance from stage to screen, a sense of compromise remains: choreographers fear that the integrity of the movement will be distorted by the television medium, while directors are limited to shooting the dance in such a way that the choreography is fully visible. This is the case at least with ‘faithful adaptations’ of stage dance. In response to these practical and aesthetic difficulties, artists began to explore the possibilities of creating dance directly for the screen. These initial developments began in the mid 1980s in the United Kingdom. Although much of this nascent work was sporadic and underdeveloped, after a decade and a half there is a vast collection of dance pieces created for the camera. This body of work has come to occupy an experimental artistic territory in which innovative filming devices and cutting-edge imagery have come to the fore. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.