Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Imagination and Play

Ericka Beckman was trained as a visual artist. While an MFA student at California Institute of the Arts in 1974–76, she moved from painting into filmmaking. The environment at CalArts was permissive and supportive of interdisciplinary art; Beckman’s mentor, John Baldessari, headed a program called Post–Studio Art. Beckmann’s projects at CalArts began with black-and-white Super-8 films shot from the monitor image of videotapes that she had produced. Her technique used the Super-8 camera as a kind of optical printer that altered the timing and framing of the video image. Her subject for these films was the production of personal and visual “icons,” single images on a black ground composed of multiple exposures of matted black-and-white video images. It was at CalArts that she met Brooke Halpin, a music student, with whom she has collaborated on the soundtracks of her films. Beckman produced ten short films as a student and gave her first New York City show at the Fine Arts Building in 1975. Her films were shown with the work of such artists as Richard Serra, Yvonne Rainer, 167 k Imagination and Play The Films of Ericka Beckman : Millennium Film Journal 13 (Fall/Winter 1983–84): 98–112 Vito Acconci, Judy Pfaff, Robert Mangold, and others. Of her early film influences, Beckman has said that the work of Warhol and Snow perturbed her and prompted her own investigations, although her strong influences at the time came from visual/performing artists: John Cage, Rainer, Acconci, Joseph Beuys, and Phillip Glass. Following Cage, she set up systems (including chance) that would manufacture the work. She was also attracted to Cage’s sense of playfulness and his willingness both to take risks and to use mistakes in his work. Beckman’s work started with establishing actions based on game structures, often involving the manipulation of objects, her own construction of props and materials, and songs and texts that she performs herself or with a few assistants.1 Since moving to New York in 1977, Beckman has made five Super-8 color films with sound. All but one of the films is about one-half hour long (Hit and Run is only seventeen minutes long). In these films Beckman has developed a distinctive style in terms of the visual appearance, the sound, and the content. In 1983 she completed her first 16-millimeter film, You the Better, also thirty minutes long, which expands on these themes and effects. Beckman’s films make use of dark backgrounds, giving the impression either of nighttime skies or a featureless, hermetic space devoid of landmarks for spatial orientation. The result is a mythic quality of a timeless, spaceless domain, a region of the imagination. But the dark background also has a practical origin. The superimpositions and double exposures that are a central feature of Beckman’s style are created by shooting actors and objects against a dark field. On this dark ground, certain actions take place, often involving special props and constructions , enacted in a vivid, graphic manner. Objects and clothing are either brightly colored or brilliant white. Shapes are simple and instantly recognizable: a circle, a square, a door, a house. Very often the objects and symbols are like toys—bright red, orange, blue, and green blocks; white and yellow hoops; a red toolbench; bright yellow briefcases. Actions predominate over such elements as plot, narrative, or character, and these actions are both basic and recurrent: falling, running, gesturing , and—notably—all sorts of actions that come from games and play. The childlike, often homemade appearance and the buoyant, cheerful tone of Beckman’s films are related to a tendency in performance art that delights in the infantile. Stuart Sherman’s play with small objects and verbal images, David Van Tieghem’s musical adventures with various toys, and the polymorphous perverse physicality of Pooh Kaye’s dances are only a few examples. The recent movement of performance 168    art toward music—especially toward the rhythmic, high-energy percussion of punk and new wave music—provides an important context for understanding Beckman’s work, because her films are either structured like songs or use repetitive, childlike incantations (composed with Brooke Halpin) to carry narrative information as well as atmospheric qualities, such as the excitement of a repeating percussive line. Another aspect of the films that is childlike is the rich counterpoint of a light, whimsical, innocent tone to content that is often violent, even morbid. As in many fairy...