Most of Douglas Rosenberg’s Dance for the Camera workshop was not devoted to Final Cut Pro editing but rather to discussing the importance of heightened critical dialogue around the art form.
The following excerpt is from his essay, “Proposing a Theory of Screendance”:
“When we think about screendance, much less comes to mind in regard to the delineation of movements or genres within the field of practice. And identifiable authorship is quite rare. This lack of self-definition is cause for concern in a field that teeters on marginality. Screendance, though equal parts film or video and dance, (and I would argue, owing more to the media side of things) is largely seen as a production of the dance world as opposed to the world of moving image production. As such, it is sheltered from the discourse that surrounds the history and production of either film or video. As such, it is often seen as an extension of dance, one that moves dance into a new venue but still in the end a product of dance production. Even while screendance is arguably a hybrid form, it finds itself without the critical mass of a serious and well-articulated discourse that would raise the level of understanding and production to that of the other arts, such as film or the plastic arts. So this is the inheritance of screendance: a critical vacuum out of which we align ourselves with the entertainment value of dance and the technical method of distribution of film and video.”
The workshop also included an analysis (and subsequent indictment) of Roslyn Sulcas’s heavily biased critique of this year’s Dance on Camera Festival, in which she lacks the critical dialogue necessary to talk about films that were not ballet or dance-centered. Moreover, work she did not understand was ungracefully dismissed, with rather crude and pejorative connotations. This served to both belittle the art form and devalue herself as a competent critic of the arts.
In the critiquing of a “screendance” (a term I had not heard until now), Rosenberg proposes stepping out of a dance perspective and into an intertextual dialogue- one that traverses contemporary art, video and film, as well as the philosophy and theory that surrounds it. He stresses the importance of different ways of seeing, and of critiquing a work on its own terms. (What was its intention? How can it be classified and discussed in a way that takes into account its cultural context- with or without “dance”?)
