Screendance Self/portraits

Abstract

Screendance works often comprise multiple authorial perspectives. The camera, staging, sound, choreography and context all contribute to the aesthetic and conceptual potential of the work. This provocation draws on Tamara Tomić-Vajagić's (2014) notion of the 'self-portrait effect' to discuss how a confluence of first and third person perspectives cultivates representations of selfhood in two screendance examples: Vis-er-al (2015) by Polly Hudson and 52 Portraits (2016) by Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, and Hugo Glendinning.

Screendance Portraiture: Truth, Transaction, and Seriality in 52 Portraits

“…Hetty Blades (2017) builds on Tomić-Vajagić's notion of self/portrait effects, arguing that self-portraiture and portraiture are further imbricated within screendance solos. One could argue, and Tomić-Vajagić acknowledges, that there are self/portrait effects to be observed in any interpretation of a plotless solo dance, though the effects will be greater when the choreographer foregrounds the dancer's role in the decision-making.…”

“…In her discussion of 52 Portraits , Hetty Blades comments on the ambiguity of authorship present in the dances, the lyrics, and the relationship to the camera (2017, 96–97). Building on Tomić-Vajagić's notion of self/portrait effects, Blades describes how the screen amplifies the blending of first and third person perspectives.…”

“…While each portrait might do this to a degree on its own, it is really through the full cumulative picture that the project realizes this aim. As both Hetty Blades (2017) and critic Judith Mackrell point out, it is necessary to view each portrait as belonging to a larger whole, contributing, as Mackrell puts it, to “an impressionistic portrait of the profession” (2016). It is rare for a dance project to be conceived in such a rigorously serial manner, and the serial nature of 52 Portraits invites comparisons to the visual arts in which series are more commonplace.…”

“…Though not entirely new, screendance portraiture is an emerging hybrid genre. Although scholarship on the relationship of solo dance to self-portraiture exists (Blades 2017; Tomić-Vajagić 2014; Cramer 2003), there is little discussion of the relationship between dance specifically crafted as portraits for screen and the vast existing scholarship on portraiture within visual arts. I unpack several concepts central to visual art portraiture and suggest how each might apply to screendance portraits.…”

Im/possible Choreographies: Diffractive Processes and Ethical Entanglements in Current British Dance Practices

“…I am thinking, for instance, of Siobhan Davies and David Hinton's film installation The Running Tongue (2016), a collaboration with twenty-two dance artists that, in depicting the journey of a running woman against a backdrop of ever-changing “visions” (Davies, Hinton, and Ellis 2015, 83), makes use of a live editing software that rearranges the frames at random at each projection, producing a kaleidoscopic rendition of the paradoxical, yet generatively indeterminate nature of choices and relationships. I am also thinking of Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, and Hugo Glendinning's project 52 Portraits (2016), which, through a series of video portraits of performance artists released online one by one each Monday of 2016, combines gestural movement and song to underscore the “interplay between movement, choreography, and self-expression” (Blades 2017, 100) and the productive relationship between individuality and plurality. Other examples include Rita Marcalo/Instant Dissidence's Dancing With Strangers: From England to Calais (2016), which imagines encounters between refugees in the Calais Jungle and people on the streets of British towns, staging impromptu duets that reenact the materiality of the meeting and envision new possibilities of exchange; Amy Bell's Tombo(y)la (2017), subtitled “A conversation with a dancer dancing in conversation with their gender; A rolling archive of tomboyhood; A drop-in durational installation” (Bell, n.d.), in which, moving and talking among audience members in response to written questions and messages extracted from a tombola drum, Bell experiments with forms of storytelling of social subjectivities to rethink gender categories; Project O's Voodoo (2017), a durational work performed over the course of eight hours (experienced as a two-hour event by four sets of spectators) by Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small, who invite the audience to a shamanic experience that weaves together political and personal narratives of black history.…”