Does screendance need to look like dance?

Abstract

This is an edited version of a paper, which was first presented at the American Dance Festival (ADF, 2008), Screendance State of the Art 2, Duke University, North Carolina, and re-presented at the symposium, Exploring the Screen as a Site for Choreography (2009), Department of Drama, Theatre, Film and Television, University of Bristol UK, before being published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (2009). Drawing on a wider field of visual art, film, dance and theatre studies, the article proposes a new knowledge map for screendance aiming to articulate the complexities of choreographic sensibilities and identifying a set of screendance strategies. The knowledge map adapts the Laban effort graph to layout a field that ranges from real time and real space to edited time and edited space, body as tool and body as site, thereby offering a more flexible and complex alternative to the existing mapping of screendance as videodance and cinedance.