Thoughts on Making Video Dance

My initial impulse to make video dance came when, on graduating from the Laban Centre, London in 1988 with a degree in Dance Theatre, I felt the urge to bring dance to as wide an audience as possible. Although I was keen to be a choreographer, I was reluctant to make work that, I felt then, would only be seen by other dance enthusiasts at one of the small, dedicated dance theatres in the big cities.

At around that time, in the U.K., new ways of making dance for television were being explored through ground-breaking schemes such as Channel 4’s ‘Dancelines’ and the BBC’s ‘Dance House’. These offered a refreshing alternative to the broadcasts of full length ballets ‘live’ from the stage at Covent Garden Opera House that then made up the majority of dance on UK television. Now experienced film and television directors a nd choreographers were being brought together to experiment with movement, cameras and editing and the results were broadcast to audiences that, although perhaps small by prime-time television standards, were inconceivable in a live theatre context. As a young dance-maker, I saw many of these short ‘video dance’ works and was inspired and excited by the potential I could see in this new, hybrid medium.

Fifteen years later, I remain as inspired and excited by video dance as an artistic medium. What is unexpected is that, of the twenty or so video dance works that I have directed in the intervening decade and a half - and although I have directed many hours of broadcast documentary arts programmes - only one of the video dance works I have made has been commission by and seen on television. This is ‘Pace’, a video dance that I made in collaboration with dancer/choreographer Marisa Zanotti as part of the BBC/Arts Council of England’s ‘Dance for the Camera’ series.

I am in no way disheartened by this outcome, for what has also happened over the past 15 years is that video dance has come into its own as an art form and there are now many opportunities beyond television for this kind of work to be funded and seen.

The money to make the majority of my video dance has c ome from both public and private commissions and the resulting works have been screened all over the world - at festivals and in cinemas, theatres and galleries.

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At the beginning of the 21st Century, video dance is coming of age. Each year, new international video dance festivals and funding schemes are established. There are now many individual artists and collaborative teams who have made several video dance works and who, over time, have developed their own unique approaches to making dance for the screen. Moreover, whilst when I started out, I was amongst the first of the so-called ‘hybrid’ video dance artists, having trained in both dance and the moving image, now in the UK and elsewhere, many undergraduate dance courses offer video dance as an area of both practical and academic study. This maturing and widening out of video dance means that it has reached the stage where the discussion of th e nature of the art form and the support of its continued development can, and must, include very different ways of working, styles of delivery and artistic intentions.

One of the benefits of having made most of my work independently is that I have been to a great extent free to explore very particular ideas, lines of enquiry and methods of working, in collaboration with many different choreographers and dancers. This article sets out to describe some aspects of this journey and I hope that it will provide an interesting and illuminating context.

Ideas and influences

My approach to making video dance has been influenced by many different factors. Whilst at Laban, I came across the work of the post-modern dance makers, for example, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. Mainly through the books of Sally Banes, and a very few video documentation of performances, I learnt about their revolutionary approaches to making dance in New York in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. I was intrigued by the post-moderns’ perception of movement as interesting in itself and not necessarily representing anything other than itself and by their presentation of so-called ‘pedestrian movement’ as dance. I was also struck by their break away from the conventional theatre setting for dance p erformances.

From a formal point of view, I found Lucinda Childs’ exploration of the effect of repetition on our perception of movement intriguing. I saw a connection between Childs work and the use of repetition in the music of minimalist such as Steve Reich and Brian Eno, as well as in the dance music that I lost myself in on the dance floor at clubs at the weekend. On visits to the south of Spain, I saw Moorish art that used repetition to create beauty and invoke contemplation.

On reading about Yvonne Rainer’s work, particularly once she had moved from dance to film-making, I related very strongly to her suggestion that we should find alternative structures than simple narrative closure, in which everything in a story ties up and makes sense by the end. To paraphrase Rainer, real life often does not have the comfort of closure and so maybe art should not be so tidy either?

After Laban, I went to art-college in Dundee to undertake a post-graduate course in Electronic Imaging. I wanted to make dance for the screen and I realised that, in order to do so, I would need to learn about video production. What I had not anticipated was that I would come across a whole different area of art – video art – which, in my view, shared much in common with the post-modern dance practises w hich had so inspired me.

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