Screen Dance Journal

Week 2: 5/10/17

In this session we started by looking at the reading ‘In and Out of Place: site-based Screendance’ by Kyra Norman. This reading talked about picking different sites for your work and how the site can effect the movement, and how it is seen on screen.

We then watched two screendances, one was Diving into Your Absence by Concha Vidal and the other was Last Dance. Diving into Your Absence was a woman in a circular pool of polystyrene balls. The woman was moving in and out of the balls, and it was only watching it closely that we realised that the whole film was in reverse. The film looked like it is going forwards, however, the way the balls are moving go against gravity and the natural directional flow, showing that it is in reverse. The second film was a woman dancing with a polystyrene man. She was hugging him, and dancing with this man, until the end, where she is laying over him on the floor, and his balls fall out of him and blow around her in the wind. She still remained to hold this man, and refused to let go of him. This gave me the impression she has lost someone close to her, and she wants to hold onto his memory.

We began the moving part of our workshop by lying on the floor, and feeling our body being held by the floor. We then moved to walking and running round the space, but we had to start and stop together. By doing this we could feel a connection between the space and with each other.  We had to use a feeling to know when people were going to move, and when it felt right to stop. We then got into partners and held different parts of their body, whilst they were lying down. We could feel and take their weight for them, so our partner knew what it felt like to be supported. We started by holing the head, feeling the weight in our hands, then moved onto an arm, the legs, then an arm and leg. We then performed our solos with different parts of our body being held. This made me think about what part of the body I am leading with when I perform my movements. When my partner held me, I tried to change the part of the body I lead with, by using their touch to decide the body part.

We were told to bring in something for this lesson. It needed to be something we have held onto for a long time. We got into a circle, described and passed round the object/story and described why we have held onto it for so long. I brought in my nanny’s gold locket, which I kept hold of after she died. The locket has a picture of my mum as a child inside of it. This locket is dear to me as my nanny wore it all the time when she was alive, and it is one way I can keep both her and my mum with me, and close to my heart. We wrote down words that described our object, its function, and what it reminded us of. Our homework for this week is to create a solo from this object and the words used to describe it.

The screen dance film I watched this week was called Various Positions of Roadkill by Nathan Lawrence. The piece is a solo dancer performing a sequence of positions/movements one after another, whilst the camera changes its angles and positions so you watch the same movement from different angles and perspectives. The beginning shot of her laying across the screen is an interesting image as it made me as the viewer scan her entire body from one side to another without the image even moving for the first few seconds. The film jumps to a close up of her hand hitting the floor. The close up shows us the detail of the image and allows us to see the shape and the shadow of her hand hitting the floor. As she performs more of her positions, the camera jumps from above, side on and close up angles of her body in the space. The above angle allows us to see the light pattern created on the floor by what seems to be windows. The dancer moves in and out of the window refections, highlighting different parts of her body. This film was useful to understand how different angles can be shot and edited together to change to interpretation of the movement.


Various Positions of Roadkill: A Screendance from Nathan Lawrence on Vimeo.