Understanding The “Dance” In Radical Screendance

There was a time when screendance implied a dancing body. The “dance” may have taken the shape of formal vocabulary or a looser interpretation of movement as dance, but common to either approach would have been the sight of humans in motion. Certain recent screendance films, however, such as David Hinton’s Birds (2000), Becky Edmunds’s This Place (2008), and Constantini Georgescu’s Spin (2009) are void of human presence. Yet whilst screendance making revels in the freedom of reconceptualization and reinvention, questions arise with regard to the experience of viewing, namely: what is the “dance” in screendance now that the human body has left center stage, and do audiences have the requisite concepts to identify and appreciate works that have outgrown traditional models? This paper investigates just what is required of viewers’ perceptions that might allow them access to screendance today. It also explores the field’s current relationship with dance through an analysis of those works that lie at screendance’s outermost edges, which here shall be referred to as “Radical Screendance.”