The Oxford Book of Screendance Studies ed. by Douglas Rosenberg (review)

Choreographing the Connections between Dance and the Screen

The Oxford Book of Screendance Studies Edited by Douglas Rosenberg Oxford University Press, 2016

Despite the long and fruitful partnership between film and dance, studies of the interaction between the two arts have been rel atively scarce until recent years—even fewer if we don't count the ones focusing on the musical or on the more obvious experimental choices, such as the works of Maya Deren. The Oxford Book of Screendance Studies, a seven-hundred-plus-page tome, takes perhaps the lengthiest and most wide-ranging look at what is admittedly a hard-to-define subject.

What is a dancefilm? While some examples seem clear thanks to the presence of conventional choreography, others can be less so, especially when they eschew commonly recognized dance forms. Such works may downplay or not even include the human body at all. Complicating matters, films that aren't classified as screendance per se can feel dancelike, and the camera's ability to create new types of choreography—including movement that couldn't exist on the stage—opens endless artistic possibilities for reconsidering the nature of dance. And, of course, both dance and film are hybrid arts to begin with, even before they come together. It is precisely this amorphousness, this problem of definition, that Douglas Rosenberg, the book's editor, and a respected scholar and filmmaker, embraces. He notes that the screen has always exerted a "gravitational pull" for all types of dance (3), a truth that even a quick perusal of film history would reveal, especially if we consider Marey's and Muybridge's precinematic movement studies and the plethora of recorded vaudeville numbers in film's earliest days. From the moment cinematographers started cranking, the camera seemed to have a natural attraction for the dancer and the choreographic.

Rosenberg's introduction makes his, and the book's, perspective immediately clear. This anthology will not include films that simply capture preexisting performance or standard-issue documentaries that profile the world of dance and dancers. There is little consideration of ballet, for example, save for Norman Maclaren's quasi-animated and masterfully manipulated short films, which Patricia Guy analyzes as cinematically created choreography. Instead, it emphasizes works where "neither dance nor media [is] in service to the other" (xi). These essays, in short, examine the inseparable relationship between two forms, when the meeting of one and the other creates a kind of chemical reaction that gives birth to something entirely new. Rosenberg is interested not only in analyzing dancefilm but in demarcating an area of study that has not been fully recognized by the institution, partly because of its interdisciplinary nature and partly because dance itself has always had a tenuous place in academia. The films here cannot be neatly categorized—they're commercial, experimental, video art, part of installations. Yet, as Rosenberg notes, dancefilms have something unique to tell us about the interrelationship of art forms as well as about the potential and multiple meanings of the human body on-screen and its representation, whether through narrative strategies or techniques of abstraction and animation. Scholars from other disciplines might be surprised at how much screendance studies have to convey about history, culture, and theory. These essays delve deeply into fundamental questions of feminism, cultural studies, art and cinema history, the philosophy of movement, and the social and physical sciences, just to name a few areas of inquiry.

Unlike in cinema studies, where a divide usually exists between the people who analyze films and those who make them, this compilation reflects the more fluid world of dance and performance studies, where scholars often double as practitioners. Many of the contributors put their theory into practice and bring their practice into their history and theory. Not surprisingly, Rosenberg finds a working model for the book in Yvonne Rainer, a dancer and choreographer who "found a freedom in film" that allowed her to extend her theatrical experimentation beyond the...