About classifications, beliefs, black cats that do not exist, genetics, Screendance practices, the Frame Rush Festival and about how to impulse new possibilities.
In the wider context of developing cultures of Screendance practices, Screendance festivals courses and workshops, Screendance histories and Screendance publications, I would like to reflect some more on how these stories and events are developed, to ensure that we continue to challenge the thinking and doing, in order to keep developing the potential of the art form. We all like to categorise and classify, and this is variously a necessity, a habit and a potential trap, which has prompted me to choose a particular text for my morning ritual of meditation on:
- those that belong to the Emperor
- embalmed ones
- those that are trained
- suckling pigs
- mermaids
- fabulous ones
- stray dogs
- those included in the present classification
- those that tremble as if they were mad
- innumerable ones
- those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
- others
- those that have just broken a flower vase
- those that from a long way off look like flies
This is a list of, let’s presume, animals, some of them fantastical, you may have guessed, published by Jorge Luis Borges, purportedly quoting from a Chinese text, the completely fictional Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. The list also appears in an essay by the French writer George Perec, entitled Think/ Classify. In this essay Perec muses on our desire for classification and bemoans that classifications don’t last: as soon as we put something in order, this order becomes obsolete. We may end up with a drawer labelled “urgent”, but with nothing in it.
Classifications can however also be persistent, leaving lasting residues of bygone orders and the values they represent, both within the arts and beyond. For example, many cultures and nations have long operated on the basis that humans divide into two genders, male and female. However, Germany has recently introduced a third option on official documents such as birth certificates and driving licenses, allowing people to register as ‘divers’, which can be translated as ‘miscellaneous’, ‘other’ or ‘different’. Another example of lasting categories would be the division of people into races, i.e. black people and white people. In a publication entitled A short history of everyone who ever lived, the British scientist Adam Rutherford states that in genetic terms the idea of race is an illusion: sifting through a multitude of misconceptions and fantasies we have attached to the idea of being human and to human genes, he argues: “Genetics has shown that people are different and these differences cluster according to geography and culture but never in a way that aligns with the traditional concepts of human races.” According to Rutherford, scientists have not been able to identify gene material that determines ‘race’ in the way we might expect.
In other words, we are culturally and historically used to ‘seeing’ people, and everything around us, according to established categories. We tend to see what we believe we are seeing, or what we imagine is there. Furthermore, in a recent edition of the radio programme Future Proofing, presented by Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson (BBC R4, 3 April 2019) about how the brain manages reality, the human brain was described as a “giant hypothesis making engine”, “optimized for the removal of doubt”. That is, the brain relies on “knowledge driven selective sampling”, making the rest up from memory and seeking to reduce uncertainty.
The Irish stand-up comedian, Dave Allen, who made comedic play of his distrust of religion in his TV shows in the 70s and 80s that recently re-surfaced in iPlayer, tells the following story, somewhat paraphrased:
Atheist to Priest: You and I are very similar.
Priest: How’s that, my daughter?
Atheist: We are both like a scientist who enters a completely darkened room wearing a blindfold, seeking to find a black cat that isn’t there.
Priest: Then, in what way are we different?
Atheist: You found the cat.
Established orders are a welcome means to negotiate the environment, but they do not facilitate generating questions about customary processes and practices. How then do we challenge familiar parameters of how we make films, what we consider dance or Screendance to be, and how do we push for new possibilities? How do we challenge and even reverse the need for certainty, and provide a condition under which we see something familiar afresh or at least differently, without the usual baggage?
In March this year, the MA students of the newly formed MA Screendance at The Place, London UK, set up a new Screendance festival entitled FRAME RUSH, and I was asked to give an introduction to the first screening. Pondering on our need for classifications, I invited the audience to consider Screendance not so much as a category of work, but as a way to look at film. During the Q&A an audience member referred back to this proposition and asked if I could not point to some criteria that identified Screendance and its approach. I decided at the time, not to attempt to identify any defining characteristics, and to leave the audience member instead with the conundrum that the non-classified artefact poses. A few weeks later I am still thinking: What if a resistance to defining Screendance, or to defining the dance in Screendance, was an all important aspect of the practice and key to its contribution to social and cultural debates? What if its contribution consisted precisely in the transgressive qualities of the art form and in its rejection of established boundaries, definitions and classifications? Might there also be a connection with the kinds of work and subject matter that can be explored through Screendance, through this transgressive, uncomfortable aspect of the art form?
The FRAME RUSH festival offered a huge variety of approaches, starting with a historical programme, which brought together four films made between 1920 and 1970 from across different areas of experimental film practice as well as choreocinema. Curated by Luisa Lazzaro, the programme provided an opportunity to look again, and to look differently at films the audience may have seen previously in other contexts and constellations, and to consider them through the lens of Screendance. Furthermore, the set of films provided a historical framework through which to see the subsequent contemporary film programmes and international screenings.
The first film was Lazlo Moholy Nagy’s Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz Weiss Grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey), a film produced during Moholy Nagy’s time at the Bauhaus, Germany, in 1930. Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist, painter and photographer, and a tutor at the famous Bauhaus, a pioneering art school founded in 1919, that promoted the interdisciplinarity we are now so familiar with, teaching architecture, crafts, design and theatre arts. For the Bauhaus artists, the stage was as a space for technological experimentation, devising all sorts of ‘Raumapparate’ (space machines), which investigated the tension and potential harmonious relations between the human and technology. In line with the wider concerns of the early 20th century, the Bauhaus artists grappled with ideas of standardization, typology, rationalization and mechanisation on one hand, and a vision of emancipation, vitality and individuality on the other. The stage, and dance, became the place and means with which to investigate these tensions.
In Black White Grey, a camera scans continuously moving patterns, visually fusing turning objects and projected shapes. These were originally generated though a sculpture which Moholy-Nagy built out of metal objects, and which turned continuously casting complex patterns of light and shadow on the surrounding walls. The official description of Moholy Nagy’s film gives a list of movements and impressions, concluding with the statement “All solid shapes dissolve into light,” a sentence which sounds much like a statement from Marx’ Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.” Made in 1930, A Lightplay: Black White Gray reflects the excitement generated by mechanical movement and technologies, making human bodies almost redundant.
This tension between the human and the machine in the pursuit of movement and mobility became programmatic for the 20th century and what we now call modernity. Starting off the programme and the festival, Moholy-Nagy’s film foregrounded this tension and also marked the films that were screened thereafter. The second film was Le Lys (1934), one of 11 dances choreographed by Loïe Fuller and filmed after her death, directed by George R. Busby, who worked later as assistant producer on films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, such as The Canterbury Tales (1944) and The Red Shoe (1948). Le Lys was filmed in southern France on a sunny, straight country road. It shows a female dancer performing Fuller’s serpentine dance whilst gradually moving along the road towards the camera. After a long tracking shot the film eventually cuts to mid-shots and close-ups on the dancer without ever disrupting the flow of the movement. The film is pure movement and technique, devoid of narrative intentions. Screened after Moholy-Nagy’s Black White Grey, it echoes and complements the mechanical perpetuum mobile, but reintroduces a human figure as the mobilizing force. Compared to Moholy-Nagy’s meditative mechanical apparatus, the human acquires a significance that I had not seen, or recognized, in earlier screenings of the film, and which came perhaps closer to that spellbinding, magic element that contemporary reviewers attributed to Fuller’s work. Framed by both the early enthusiasm for the mechanical apparatus and the current ubiquity of technological mobility, that single twirling dancer, caught in that moment and space in time, unfolds a human presence that is utterly compelling.
Le Lys was followed by Maya Deren’s At Land (1944), a work that will be known to many cinephiles, and that was, very deliberately, challenging the parameters of narrative conventions whilst advancing cinema as a form of image making. For Deren, a Jewish-born, Ukrainian poet and filmmaker who came to be part of the American, émigré art scene in Greenwich village, film was a means to create a world in which space and time function according to their own rules, also resonating with Moholy-Nagy’s work and with the ‘space machines’ of the Bauhaus. The screen space was for Deren not a metaphorical or symbolic reflection of this world, but its own sphere, conceived by the filmmaker.
The fourth and concluding film of this historical programme was Len Lye’s Free Radicals, made in 1958 and revised by the artist in 1970. Born in New Zealand he worked predominantly in the UK and Canada, often scratching into black leader of 16mm film stock. Len Lye shared an interest in ritual practices with Deren, and in modern physics, also using film to explore the potential of space and time in abstract configurations. Free Radicals was a playful and upbeat coda to the programme, a celebration – and perhaps ode – to the modernist ideal of energy and vitality. This work was very successful in experimental film circles at the time, and it is also utterly ‘screendance’, but I will abstain from trying to explain what I mean with that.
This programme was perhaps not so much an uncomfortable but a delicious kind of transgressive journey, as long as one went along with the ride through 50 years of filmmaking in the space of 50min, spanning different continents, cultures and artistic communities.
What followed was a programme entitled Urban Dance on Screen and three international screenings, all of which were selected by the MA students from an extensive pool of 2000 international submissions. The films brought together under the notion of urban dance, selected by Omari Carter, were particularly rich in their exploration of American Black male experience, Afro-urban relations and a renewed quest for motion and wellness, including a remarkable work entitled Figure (2018), choreographed and directed by Lanre Malaolu, UK. This work shows two men who are in search of themselves and each other, but who are not alone in this endeavour, a moving appeal to the significance of community and belonging.
I conclude this essay by indulging the compulsion to end with a final sentence that, by character or affordance or prejudice belongs to the end.
END.