American Dance Festival | Screendance: The State of the Art 2

SCREENDANCE: THE STATE OF THE ART 2
CURATING THE PRACTICE/CURATING AS PRACTICE

July 10 – 13, 2008
American Dance Festival
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

ADF is delighted to announce Screendance: The State of the Art 2, the second hosted by the ADF in a series designed to facilitate an ongoing discussion among both makers and scholars of screendance, as well any others interested in the overlaps of dance and media.

Participants will gain exposure to the field’s most cutting-edge theories, research, and observations through four days of panels, presentations, screenings, and demonstrations. As members of the ADF community, attendees will have additional access to networking opportunities and the option of attending a world premiere as part of the ADF’s 75th anniversary performances.

To attend the four-day symposium and participate in the ADF’s 75th anniversary celebrations, applicants should submit a registration form and fee to the ADF by Friday, June 27, 2008.

As the field becomes more popular and we welcome new festivals of screendance around the globe, how festivals are programmed becomes more and more important. Festivals are the conduit through which most people are able to view screendance, though it is often unclear how a festival builds its public programs. Is there a jury, an individual curator? What is the difference between a curated or juried screening and one that is “programmed” and what are the concerns of each?

This conference is intended to create a platform for discussing the nature of curatorial practice and its relationship to screendance, as well as its function in creating a forum for criticality. Curating comes from an art model in which an individual or group attempt to create meaning from a group of artworks, a product of the relationship of one object or image or film to another. Curating dance film and video is a way of constructing narratives about the field of sceendance that may be otherwise invisible or absent. It is also a way to interrogate individual works of screendance, collective, individual or group practice, and to actively shape and comment upon the field in general. Yet it seems that curating, in its truest sense, is largely absent from the screendance festival circuit and from screendance exhibition in general. Curating creates a foundation for criticality as it frames and groups individual works around issues of content or form or other myriad concerns. Thus, the possibility of a critical dialog is amplified through active curatorial practice. Curating and criticality are linked and synergistically contribute to an elevated discussion about meaning, purpose, form and content in the field of screendance.

Having been at the forefront of modern dance since 1934, the ADF is a fitting host for the State of the Art conference. Dating back to the Dance for Television workshops that began in 1973, the ADF has consistently facilitated experiments in dance and screen media, including the production of the Emmy award-winning documentary series Free to Dance which aired nationally on PBS in 2001. For over a decade, the ADF has hosted Dancing for the Camera, an international festival of film and video dance. The 13th annual Dancing for the Camera Festival will coincide with State of the Art 2 and will feature juried works in four categories: works choreographed for the camera, documentary productions, experimental work and student work.

The ADF collaborates with Douglas Rosenberg, a video dance-maker and Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to facilitate an in-depth look at the state of the art of screendance. Mr. Rosenberg served as the director of the ADF’s video archival program for a decade and is the founder and director of ADF’s Dancing For the Camera Festival, which he continues to direct.

—In Review—

Screendance: The State of the Art
July 6 – 9, 2006

ADF's first Screendance: The State of the Art conference, a four-day symposium on the current state of screendance around the globe, was held at the ADF in Durham, North Carolina from July 6-9, 2006. The conference coincided with the NEA Arts Journalism Institute for Dance Criticism and the 11th annual Dancing for the Camera: International Festival of Film and Video Dance.

Screendance was intended to provide a critical forum for discourse on the history and practice of creating dance for film, video, and new media. Alternately known as cine-dance, video dance, and dance for camera, the form is leaving its adolescence and entering a period of maturation, making this precisely the time to take a rigorous look at the genre. Overlapping with the convening of the participants of the NEA Arts Journalism Institute for Dance Criticism, Screendance brought together internationally renowned scholars, choreographers, critics, and filmmakers for a series of panels, papers, screenings, mini-workshops, and demonstrations. Twenty nine presenters from Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States presented new theories, research, and observations about the vital genre of screendance. Events included a discussion of the early dance films of Loie Fuller by Ann Cooper Albright of Oberlin University, a movement for camera workshop with Olive Bieringa of Minneapolis’s BodyCartography Project, a survey of Canadian dance film curated by Judy Gladstone of Bravo!FACT Canada, the presentation of a theory of cine-dance by Robert Haller of Anthology Film Archives, and a wrap-up session with Bob Lockyer of the United Kingdom’s South East Dance Agency.