Testing ground: evolving screendance practices and theories and the Leeds International Film Festival Screendance Competition

Abstract

Context In its first two years, LIFF SDC has brought together a number of key international artists, curators, and writers engaged in dance and moving image to shortlist, select, present, and discuss the work, including Gitta Wigro, Simon Fildes, Marisa C. Hayes, Claudia Kappenberg, Silvina Szperling, Liz Aggiss, and Leonel Brum. Following the Screendance Competition at the Leeds International Film Festival in 2015, I was struck by the ways in which this event makes visible, and actively engages with, several issues that seem to define current discourse around screendance. If I review recent writing on screendance, three key questions emerge:• How might we (screendance artists, curators, audiences and researchers) draw on the separate knowledges and ways of seeing that varied dance and moving