FAST FORWARD
Updated excerpts from an article written for “Envisioning dance on film and video,” a book published in 2002 by Routledge, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer.
By Deirdre Towers
Dancers are tapping into a collective energy, that in all its swirling confusion, is creating a new language. The language of dance on film and video does not have a set grammar, yet it captures and expresses what neither live dance or traditional film can — intimacy. Collaborating filmmakers and choreographers can shout or whisper their inner thoughts, imply by gesture or tantalize with magnificently bold movements.
Dancers work with multi-layered narrative, surreal, and abstract structures. Even the most abstract dance, set in nature, falls into the movement of Neo-Romanticism. Nature becomes a metaphor for the emotions expressed by the dance, with specific landscapes chosen to clarify the state of mind implied. These videos reverse the point of view of the dream ballet sequences characteristic of Hollywood and Broadway musicals of the 1940s: rather than dancing in a dream, dance film collaborators invite the viewer to dream.
Documenting dance is the equivalent of pliés, a warm up for the eyes and mind to communicate in the gravity-free universe of the screen. The 19th century pas de deux has become a pas de quatre, with the cameraman and the editor as the magicians lifting the ballerina to greater heights. A lacing of three “takes”: one of the visual record of the physical encounter, and then two for tracking the stream of conscious reactions of a dancer transform crowd pleasing tricks of another era.
Dancers working in the realm of film can shift between thinking in two and three dimensions. They will become bilingual, fluent in the languages of the stage and the screen. The boundaries between art disciplines fade as artists of every kind mingle to express their experience of time and space. Questions of foreground and background, of planes, volume and dynamics, effort and shapes are practical ones for artists of all mediums. Video choreographers “paint” with bodies, shaping and conditioning the performance space with both a surface design and depth of field.
Video has gained a solid place in the museum world and the hospitality industry. As immersive installations have gained popularity — notably the Van Gogh blockbuster, we may enter a gallery soon filled with screens connected to interactive buttons that set period figures dancing or Cubist cones spinning. Recalling the Spanish artists Gaudi and Dali with their love of melting solids, perhaps we’ll see dancers stretching and shrinking around corners, sinking into the floor, disappearing down holes. A passing viewer could play a video on wall-size monitors, pausing it to study a particular frame. Will architects soon commission film choreographers to create dances to enhance ceilings much as painting did in Renaissance Italy?
Neuroscientists will guide us to manage our personal wiring and mapping, emotional scarring and healing so that our needs for entertainment and diversion may be redefined. Scientific institutions may commission choreographers to explain challenging concepts in ways simple enough to engage a child.
As cinematic dream machines for dance and art flourish, proper facilities in which to shoot dance will be created. Just as a theatre has wings, trapdoors, revolving platforms, and sets to capture a sense of perspective, the studio of the future will have rooms high enough to shoot from overhead and deep enough for cameramen to crawl under glass floors. Glass ceilings, digitally controlled walls to imply any environment and cameras set in the walls could be remotely controlled by dancers with the push of a button. Using the techniques of motion capture in a computer environment, dancers could create their own set designs drawn from the trajectory of their movement. The studio will have the capacity to contain all the elements: a pool with underwater cameras, a fireproof studio, tons of earth, and a gravity free chamber.
By the year 2050 when choreographers jetpack to their studios, they’ll arrive with their warm-up complete, having stretched in midair along the way. The wall size mirror — which doubles as an archivist and a computer secretary will greet them with a screensaver of yesterday’s best aerial variation. As the dancers straggle in, the choreographer could walk through a heat-sensitive hallway programmed to search for a sound or music that is directly “in tune” with that day’s/that moment’s/that particular artist’s sensibility.
Envision a choreographer reviewing her laptop notes: “Check video thesaurus for another leap to replace the one in time-code 01:06:20:04.” “Tell Samantha she must look into her gene pool to see what can be eliminated to erase her hears about re-entering the gravity field. She is breaking the rhythm of the group in the cloud scene.” “Find someone whose legs serve as a complement to Samamtha’s torso. We’ll just have to substitute her from the waist down.”
As Boston Dynamics found with their endearing choreography of robots trying to woo hearts with their DO YOU LOVE ME?, robots may be designed to be our ultimate pets/life coaches knowing just what to do to keep us grinning and glowing. Dancers of the future will become central to societal health as engineers, psychologists, neurologists, and artists collaborate to inspire innovation and evolution.
Instead of fretting over AI, we should celebrate that technology can help the ageless art of dance to be more affective as healers, as catalysts, as communicators. The dancers of the future will have the technique to both perform and convey the magic they feel. Rather than simply using bigger, louder, omnipresent displays of dancers, the dancers of the future will be able to goad people to mentally, spiritually dance, through the clarity of their use of imagery, dynamics, color, and poetry.