The Art of Screendance: revealing a location led methodology.

Abstract

This practice-based PhD by publication explores the parameters of screendance and extends it, redefining this ever morphing form into the realm of contemporary visual arts and focusses on location as an intentional source of response. This submission comprises five moving image projects made between 2005 and 2015, plus this 41,000 word synthesis. Together, they demonstrate an enduring emphasis on and connection between conceptual, contemporary visual art and screendance, and reveal site as an intimate and dynamic source for creativity in screendance: as inspiration, realisation and reception. Scoping out and naming screendance as an art form shapes a new paradigm set, within which is a striking and significant group of rebellious, innovative, experimental, courageous, sensuous and sensitive makers. To contextualise this proposition, this PhD considers screendance from a historical perspective, explores dance in contemporary video art and draws together screendance practitioners and land artists. The artists I have selected have a profound influence on my own practice, and I connect them through the lens of my own unique practice and process. I explore how landscape, location, and space have a central, deliberate role in the collaborative nature of screendance art practice: not just filmmaker and dancer, but filmmaker, dancer and location. In the light of this triad, I reframe screendance as a site based art form. In creating a form specific taxonomy around camera and dancer on site, I demonstrate how, by introducing conceptual artistic choices to production on location, the process of making on site becomes a varied, playful, subverted and far less predictable happening, breathing new life and breadth into the form. I unpack my organic ‘site pulse’ location led process of discovery and response and describe how I continue to recycle and reconceptualise the works in response to the site of reception. Citing practitioners including Fuller, Wearing and Long, and theorists such as Rosenberg, Kappenberg and Tufnell, I connect screen dance with land art, demonstrating that place is pivotal.