Screendance and Surrealism

In his 1874 prose-poem Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), French author Comte de Lautréamont describes a young boy in the following manner: “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella[1]”. This sentence led German/American/French painter Max Ernst to describe the structure of the surrealist painting as «a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them».

To what extent does such a definition apply to screendance, this chance meeting of choreography and cinematography on an editing table? Could this apply to the umbrellas of Singin’ in the Rain and to the mechanism akin to a sewing-machine necessary to move films strips forward in movie projectors, thanks to their perforations? To what point is screendance capable of mixing in its works cinema and dance, dreams and reality, in order to create a sort of surdance? A fundamentally hybrid form of art such as screendance might be well designed to explore the realm of the unconscious, be it personal or collective, and its unusual images flowing over our shared reality.

The 11th International Video Dance Festival of Burgundy will focus on this theme in July 2019, combining screenings and an international research conference over a week. Although it was not the festival’s focus in the past, one can nevertheless argue that the several projects it initiated beginning in 2013 around collective films have a lot to do with Surrealism. Intended to gather screendance artists to revisit the Rite of Spring (Sacre/lège(s), 2013), the Danses Macabres (2016), and Louis XIV’s Ballet de la Nuit (2018), these works very much function as exquisite corpses – a surrealist technique by which a collection of words or images (in this case, films) is collectively assembled, each collaborator adding to a composition in sequence. The kind of strange and surprising clashes and/or harmonies resulting from such a semi-random approach to visual and choreographic composition, not unlike the work of Merce Cunningham with John Cage, generates creations that are more than the sum of their parts.

Of course, one could argue that screendance (and musicals) are surrealist by nature, as people usually are not seen dancing in these situations in real life the way they do in such films, leaving everything aside to jump into strange pas de deux with a camera. Nevertheless, certain characteristics are more likely to apply to a surrealist work of screendance than to others: a strong emphasis on dream logic, for instance, as well as an interest for the notion of madness seen as something fascinating, without forgetting a certain black humor that holds it all together. The films of Maya Deren definitely owe a lot to the non-linear logic of dreams, and so do those of Kathy Rose, with a strong leaning towards psychedelia in her case. A Page of Madness (a Japanese silent horror film from 1926, directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa) includes several choreographic moments of interest, and additionally, it could be argued that any silent film is a work of screendance of sorts, because of its constant emphasis on movement. Finally, as far as black humor is concerned, René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) is a good example, with its hearse drawn by a camel and its followers performing something not unlike the Monty Pythons’ Ministry of Silly Walks.

An interesting portion of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) can also be summoned to discuss the relationship between screendance and Surrealism: “The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory… For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception… The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (chapter 13). The use of the unconscious optics (through slow motion, close ups, etc.) makes it possible to better understand the unconscious impulses as we can access behaviors, movements that would remain otherwise invisible to the human eye, and therefore better analyze what unconscious drives bring them into existence. In a way, filming the body enables one to better reach the unconscious, as it expresses itself through involuntary motions, slips of the tongue, etc. Screendance can play a role in such a process as it is mostly concerned with the human body and its movements, which it records, dissects, reconstructs in multiples ways. This practice enables the viewer to act as an analyst of sorts, accessing what’s hidden (the unconscious) via what is visible (the image of the body) thanks to the powers of cinema. All of this relates screendance to Surrealism in the sense that the dreamlike nature of the unconscious, up to what is usually repressed by the individual, suddenly merges with our shared reality, creating thus an augmented reality, a surreal superposing of what is inside and what is outside, the flow of the thought process and the one of the choreography, under the unforgiving scalpel of the camera.

In a sense, by showing us how surreal every aspect of our waking life constantly is, and the extent to which reality becomes permanently merge with our inner life, screendance, with its focus on movements, obsessively dissected on the editing table, gives us the possibility, from time to time, to wake up from this slumber we call life. Though a surreal approach to screendance may tend to be criticized as unreal, the opposite might actually be true, and this could very well be the closest one ever gets to what lies behind our apparent freedom of movement.

[1] Œuvres complètes, Lautréamont, éd. Guy Lévis Mano, 1938, chant VI, 1, p. 256

LINKS OF INTEREST

• Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne: http://www.videodansebourgogne.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/videodanceburgundy
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/FestVidDanceFr
• Numéridanse: http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/collections/116_video-dance-center-of-burgundy
• Screendance Studies: http://screendancestudies.wordpress.com/
• Book/Livre: Art in Motion/Art en mouvement: http://www.cambridgescholars.com/art-in-motion