Opinions - November 2004
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“La Loie’ as Pre-Cinematic Performance – Descriptive Continuity of Movement”
This essay focuses on the history of the relations between dance and film and is structured around the birth of both modern dance and the cinema at the end of the nineteenth century. Theories of modernity have tended to focus on the effects of the technologies of industry, leisure and entertainment upon the broader urban milieu with some reference to the conditions for the human body which is generally figured as under duress. My discussion aims to refigure the role of the dancer as a cultural influence that was translating the forces of technology, along with new notions of the moving body and movement itself in society, medicine, science and philosophy, into an influential artistic force. If cinema was a cultural phenomena dealing, in some sense, with the conditions of modernity, it can be brough
t into a relation with the newly emerging theatre dance form which was doing the same. The figure of fin de siécle dancer Loïe Fuller provides a connection between the various facets of early twentieth century modernity that are relevant to the emergence of dancefilm. Felicia McCarren and Sally Sommer have made links between the cinema and Fuller which I develop to bring dance into the field of activities – cultural, scientific, clinical and philosophical – that are considered central to the emergence of cinema. Working with dance, proto-cinematic techniques and film, Fuller provides an historical foundation for a consideration of dancefilm in interdisciplinary terms and qualities of her work are found in dancefilm examples from the early avant-garde up to the present.
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“Maya Deren, Dance and Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Time”
In this essay, Maya Deren’s writings on film provide the basis for considering her dancefilm works such as A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-6). A pivotal figure in the history of dancefilm, Deren’s films marked the re-emergence of the form within the avant-garde for the first time since the experiments of the Futurists, Surrealists and Dadaists earlier in the twentieth century. Operating outside the major American film studios, which at the same time were releasing their highest output of dance musicals, Deren was working with modern and untrained dancers to create choreographies for the screen that realised seminal strategies for dancefilm that can be found in the most recent examples of the form.
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