Danza-Tec – LCDS MASD exchange 2022
This text is part of a collection of pieces tracing a two-day online exchange between the Danza-Tec research group at Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, and the MA Screendance student cohort at London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS), London, in March 2022.
The MA Screendance (MASD) focuses on dance-filmmaking practice: it is designed as a space for artists to explore and refine their practice and situate it in a contemporary critical context. One of the core modules invites the students to create their own edition of Frame Rush, a public screendance event. They devise a focus for the event, create an open call inviting films from other practitioners, and from this, programme a screening they produce and present to the public. The process poses a range of questions to the students: creative, practical, and ethical.
The artists on the MA, the students, are fully in charge of the event. While they are guided, challenged, and supported by the teaching staff and a freelance producer, they plan and execute the event collaboratively according to their own aims. The students use the experience to consider the meeting point between art and its audiences, and how that insight might inform their own creative practice. Something as seemingly straightforward as writing marketing copy for the festival or editing the synopsis of one of the selected films raises questions about who the event is aimed at; how the field speaks to those audiences currently, and how well (or not) that communication is working. This in turn asks the artist: how do you engage with this in your own work?
This unit formed the meeting place of the exchange. The students shared a selection of films they had chosen from the open call for their edition of Frame Rush 2022; Magdalena Casanova, Mauro Cacciatore and Silvina Szperling considered the students’ curation and offered their own questions and provocations in response. The first session focused on a discussion on curatorial and critical practices, with provocations from Mauro and Magdalena. The students were then invited to choose a film from the Frame Rush programme and create a video critique, based on the guidelines and tools shared and discussed during the meeting, and in the second session we viewed and discussed these critiques.
“This was an experimental way to learn more about the films we have selected, and helped me to open another path in my brain.” (Sut Ieng Ashley Lei)
Untitled, Sut-Ieng Ashley Lei
“What do we count as a critique – how we relate our viewing and critiquing to the curation and connections between the films.” (Azize)
Dust to Dirt, Azize Sousami
“It was useful to know that there is more than one way to critique a film – using image, sound and text to show my interpretation of a film.” (Caitlin)
Untitled, Caitlin McKinnon
Untitled, Siyuan Meng
Untitled, Madi Plunkett
Mauro Cacciatore, in his contribution to the exchange, highlighted the potential of exhibiting work as a discursive act, that “allows us to continually rewrite and re-evaluate the meaning of artistic objects.” Handing the student cohort this layered, malleable process of curation gives them the opportunity to consider the tangible and intangible networks in which art is made and encountered. Who makes what choices, and on what basis? What is the effect of one choice over another?
The curatorial process has its parallels with the filmmaking process: creating meaning by placing images, objects, sounds, in relation to one another.
Seeing 100+ films submitted to Frame Rush as part of the programming process generates a lot of opportunity for reflection for the artists on the MA: Why do I respond to work the way I do? What do I look for in other work? What does this teach me about my practice? Reflecting on the submission viewing process, MASD student Azize Sousami writes:
My interest as a creative is to experience an artist’s life perspective through their work. It felt like first dates, each time. Again. Viewing the film submissions felt like a crash course in itself; overstimulation where I searched for both a flight; and a ground. It taught me to trust my instinct. I would put my thoughts on the hot seat. Which opinions were mine, truly, and which were pre-conditioned? It was interesting to separate the two, and then add the idea of an audience into my judgement process.[1]
The volume of work in an open call also highlights what is not there: we know that demographic representation in screendance is distorted[2]. The cohort is compelled to address this both in their approach to designing the event, and to reckon with this knowledge as an artist and maker creating their own work: what do they choose to reflect back to society? MASD student Madi Plunkett commented:
As a maker of screendance I found the viewing process extremely beneficial. I have a better understanding of the work that is out there and currently being made, the stories that are being told, and the ones that aren’t. I have also become much more aware of my own bias, and I am starting to see patterns emerging in what I am drawn to in other people’s work. This means that I can not only draw from this in the future, but also question it.[3]
Thus, an in-depth engagement with criticality, a facility with tools of analysis and creative synthesis, is central to this unit and the students’ overall process. The exchange with Danza-Tec, and particularly engaging with the video-critiques, provided another pathway for the students to consider the experience of viewing and selecting films as makers. Not only did the critiques open up a deeper engagement with the films, for both the person creating the critique and those viewing it; the process crucially shifted the work of interpreting, contextualising and evaluating the film into a making process, employing the artists core toolset, and broadened the methods in which we can critique a film. It also, as Magdalena pointed out in discussion, surfaces the critique-makers own voice; rather than assuming an objective authoritative stance, the video critiques manifested the subjectivity of their creators.
The video critiques created by the students were also on display for audiences on the day of the event. The presence of these works was an acknowledgement that as the curators of the event, as Silvina Szperling noted in one of the sessions, “you have your own reactions, opinions; you are artists, you are artist curators.”
Taking this time during the Frame Rush process to encounter and engage with the deep questions posed by the Danza-Tec artists was much like zooming into a frame: a moment to focus on the building blocks of the event through these outside perspectives, rooted in a practice of making: “It was an experimental way to learn more about the films we have selected, and helped me to open another path in my brain,” according to student Sut Ieng Ashley Lei.
As a curator and programmer myself, I am always looking for ways to deepen my understanding of my subjectivity and its relationship with the responsibility that comes with being a gatekeeper. Cara Hagan’s Treatise on Curating talks about this effort when she calls for “deeper consideration of our work as a philosophical and technical pursuit both separate from and necessary to the health and proliferation of screendance”[4] (2022, p.182). Interventions and invitations like this exchange with Danza-Tec are an example of the creative tools we can develop to strive towards our roles as makers, stewards, communicators, and conduits of screendance.
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Video critiques:
- Untitled, Sut-Ieng Ashley Lei; Film: Moving Barcelona, dir. Jevan Chowdhury, United Kingdom, 2021, 06’21”
- Dust to Dirt, Azize Sousami; Film: Mi Tierra Entera, dir. Alexandra Meneghini and Elena Du Pisanie, Spain, 2021, 09’30”
- Untitled, Caitlin McKinnon; Film: Yurodivy, dir. Ryan Renshaw, Australia, 2021, 03’51”
- Untitled, Madi Plunkett; Film: Silk, Paper and Bruises, dir. Gabriella Engdahl, Sweden, 2021, 02’55”
- Untitled, Siyuan Meng, Film: That Square Space, dir. Tal Kronkop and Mica Kupfer, Israel, 2021, 13’04” (note – this film was submitted but not part of the Frame Rush programme)
[1] Sousami, A. (2022), from coursework submitted for the MA Screendance.
[2] Hagan, C. (2017). ‘Visual Politics in American Dance Film: Representation and Disparity’. The International Journal of Screendance, 8 [Online]. Available at: https://screendancejournal.org/article/view/5360/4675
(Accessed: 6 January 2018)
[3] Plunkett, M. (2022), from coursework submitted for the MA Screendance.
[4] Hagan, C. (2022). ‘Screendance from Film to Festival’. North Carolina: McFarland & Company
*Foto portada: captura de pantalla del encuentro del 10 de marzo de 2022.