I saw work by video artists like Bill Viola and Gary Hill, which seemed to me to also to take human movement as its subject and through it conveyed the very essence of human existence. A touring programme of German video art from the 1980’s particularly impressed me. Here, highly textural abstract images, unidentifiable, yet obviously derived from images of human action, were edited using repetition, the sound and image interacting and building up rhythms which I found both compelling and very moving.
By the time I graduated from art-college, I had made my own connections between various artistic practises and had formed a clear idea of the kind of ideas that inspired me. These experiences where brought to bear on a series of different collaborations and creative environments. Whilst the initial starting point for each of the video dance works I have directed may have be different, the work shares common concerns and approaches. These include:
a formal
exploration of video dance as a means of expressing human emotion;
ways of finding non-narrative structures;
the combined use of sound and picture;
a non-virtuosic use of the camera i.e. framing and movement on a human scale;
the use of location;
the use of repetition and looping in editing, to completely deconstruct the action as it happened live and create to structure, logic and rhythms unique to the video dance.
Dancing Partners
The camera, and its relationship to the human body, is central to my approach to making video dance. With the camera, I try to create an energy that involves the viewer in the movement, allowing them to become an active participant in the action, rather than simply a passive observer.
Whatever the idea for the work, my choices about how to use the camera are strongly influenced by my belief that at the heart of video dance is the expression of human emotion. When I look at movement through the lens, I try to do so as though I am involved in an interaction with the person or people in front of me. Like my own eyes, the camera is usually drawn to details of body and movement. Very often I am interested in what is happening in the face and eyes of the performer.
Th
rough the use of close ups and different angles, the camera can take the viewer to places they could not usually reach. The lens can enter the dancer’s kinesphere – the personal space that moves with them as they dance – framing the detail of the movement and allowing an intimacy that would be unattainable in a live performance context.
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In my experience, it is often the movement of the body parts outside the frame that creates interesting and active viewing. The framing I chose often focuses on a detail of movement, frustrating the audiences view of the ‘whole’, whilst at the same time creating dynamic and tension within the shot and forcing the viewers’ imagination to come into play.
How the camera moves in relation to the performers is another important aspect of filmin
g dance. The choreographed camera, moving through space in relationship to the dancers, alters our perception of the dance, rendering it three-dimensional and creating a fluid and lively viewing experience.
However, what I have also discovered is that the carefully choreographed camera can lose out on an important element of dance: the feeling of spontaneity, the energy of the moment, which can make watching someone dance live such an exhilarating experience. This dilemma, and the search to find a solution, has also significantly informed my approach to making video dance.
Working with improvisation
When I started out making video dance, I would storyboard everything I planned to film, designing exact shots which explored framing and camera movement in relation to the choreographed dance movement. However, over time, I began to feel that what was gained in carefully contrived shots was being lost by a certain lack of fluidity and immediacy in the dancers’ performance. In the need to ensure that a pre-planned camera movement could happen or a certain light and framing came into play, fixed points in space needed to be reached by the dancers. The result often seemed to be that the dancers’ movement, and therefore performance, was impeded.
In order to redress this, and in
an attempt to retain the integrity of the dancers’ performance, I started to explore a more fluid approach to making video dance. Over a number of works, and in collaboration with different dancers and choreographers, I began to use structured improvisation as a creative tool. My approach drew on processes for generating dance material often used by choreographers.
The idea of improvisation is that those working, in this case the dancers and camera operator, decide how they should move (or how they should film) in the moment. They base this decision on their experience of what they see and feel in the moment, informed to a greater or lesser extent by certain ideas, rules, restrictions or ‘scores’.
When developing a new video dance work, as the director, I set a series of improvisations with ‘rules’ suggested by knowledge of the possible spatial and motional relationships between camera and dancers. Through rehearsal and repetition, a vocabulary of framing and movement is built up, forming a palette of video dance material that is then ‘choreographed’ in the edit suite.
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