This is what I believe: Dance is primal. It’s a life force. It belongs to everyone.
Dance crosses over borders of culture, language, and nation to connect us in our essential humanity. We are all born with an instinct to move in a way that simply and innately is dance. We all have bodies, and most of us can move in some capacity, if only with our hands and arms which are so eloquent in delivering and emphasizing emotion. As Twyla Tharp once said, “Dance is simply the refinement of human movement – walking running and jumping. We are all experts.”
And yet like life itself, dance is ephemeral – it’s only there when it’s there. We can’t pick it up and take it home with us. It can be memorialized in photos, captured on film, lives on in our memories, lays dormant or sleeping in our bodies. But it’s only there when it’s there.
And until more recently, dance has been a kind of rarified art form. For the longest time it seemed like it was only for people who could afford the training, people with a certain kind of access and awareness, a certain kind of physical build… And so few people, at least in the US, knew much about dance beyond the familiar forms of classical, jazz, modern and tap.
“FlyAway Home”, by Sarah Elgart/Arrogant Elbow, photo by Moses Hacmon
As a choreographer and director, I have always been concerned with the notion of “democratizing dance”. Maybe it began when I was very young, studying dance at Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany. Then under the sway of Pina Bausch, I was regularly in class, and friends with many of her dancers. And when I began to see her work for myself, and met Pina as well, I was initiated into the concept of both the stage, and dance, as an arena into which anything from real life could be introduced… a notion that thrilled me.
Back in the US navigating the various peaks and valleys of my career with a dance company, I simultaneously fell into working as a choreographer for music videos, commercials, film, and television, and creating choreography in prisons with maximum-security women inmates. Polar opposites, I know, but somehow they all related.
“Shape of Memory” @ Jacob’s Pillow, photo by Noor Eemaan
As the child of two artists, I had grown up on a healthy staple of art house films: Truffaut, Fellini, de Sica… their images filled my memory banks: small, wordless, nonsensical vignettes that approached choreography in their composition. Working in film brought me back in touch with those images. I began a fascination with that medium as well, especially as it related to dance. Regularly working with a variety of directors I often got involved in developing ideas, or would be pulled into the editing room for post-production notes. It was an ad-hoc film school. I loved how with the tools of film you could do almost anything imaginable. In the editing room I felt like Alice fallen through the looking glass… I could invert time, turn movement inside out or upside down, defy the laws of physics and gravity.
When I managed to get permission to pull a videographer into the prison to record the inmates’ rehearsals and performances, I started playing with my own footage. With the inmates I had begun exploring raw, pedestrian, human gesture more so than any formalized dance. I wanted to level the playing field for these women… I felt strongly that all people should have access to movement as the universal language of dance, and that dance in turn could contain anything. In a way, my four-year experience working with the inmates was an amalgamation of everything I had learned in Germany and felt intuitively already: namely that everything could be included in dance, and that what we identified as dance could and must be accessible to everyone.
So in 2013, while still choreographing and directing for film, site, and screen, and after more than six years of working in various capacities with Dance Camera West Film Festival, I was invited by the online magazine Cultural Weekly to write a regular column about the artistic intersection of dance and camera, and started the column ScreenDance Diaries. Dance on film was blowing up. And it seemed like nearly every country across the globe suddenly had its own dance film festival. I felt I was performing a public service in illuminating people about the beauty, power, and importance of the growing genre of dance films.
Several years into writing my column, I realized I could do much more. I had a platform and readers, and it wasn’t only usable for educating and delighting, but also to actively question the notion that there was a proper time and place for dance. I wanted to excite and incite people to dance outside of traditional venues… to inspire dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers to challenge organized notions of dance: Was dance such a rarified form that it could only be respected when it was taught, learned, and performed institutionally in a specific way? Was dance only relegated to studios and theaters? Why couldn’t dance happen in public?
“Shape of Memory” Sarah Elgart/ArrogantElbow, Insitu Site-Specific Dance Festival, photo by Stephen Delas Heras
It was out of these seemingly disparate original concerns that Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival (D2D) was born. Founded in 2016, D2D is an online and live film festival devoted to the international genre of screen dance. We are committed to promoting dance that happens in the public realm – outside of studios and off traditional stages… dance that explores place and space, engages an unsuspecting public, and intersects with film.
Today, even in the face of a global pandemic, we will once again be launching D2D: Round 4. And this year, along with accepting dance films done in public up to six and a half minutes in length, we also have separate initiatives like Six Foot Distance Dances, a series of one-minute dance films exploring issues of isolation and separation during the pandemic, while safely socially distanced in accordance with the laws of your area. Each year at D2D we have a panel of internationally acclaimed judges from the worlds of dance, film, theater and more. Past judges have included renowned choreographers, dancers, directors, and other professionals including Desmond Richardson, Vincent Paterson, Tony Testa, Valerie Faris, Julie McDonald and many others. And D2D receives submissions from all over the world.
With the advent of the web as well as the introduction of dance into popular culture, film stopped being just a vehicle for documenting and preserving dance. In the past fifteen years or so especially, dance on film – aka Screen Dance – has become established as an art form unto itself. Choreographers, dancers, and filmmakers, have begun exploring the medium as its own platform… a way to communicate and share information, publicize their work, cross- pollinate forms and ideas, and so much more. And accelerated by the rapid prevalence and affordability of smart phones and other technology, dance is once again being claimed as a vital, urgent, visceral language of the people.
People know what they know, they know what they don’t know, but they don’t know what they don’t know. As I create more and more site-specific work, I am always excited by how I can introduce an unsuspecting audience of passersby to a whole new form. And the more we do that in every aspect of dance, the more we investigate dance’s relationship to place, space, time, culture, camera… the more we democratize dance as an art form for and of the people.
So go out and dance. Do it in public. Film it, and share it. We dare you to.
*Cover photo: “Ghost Story”, a dance film by Sarah Elgart, photo by Matt Butterfield.