Refusing to be captured; camera and dance.

On Valentine's Day, New York University celebrated the accomplishments of Annette Michelson, an author and professor of cinema studies at NYU. Among her contributions cited was "her trenchant opposition to trends in contemporary scholarship in which the value of the art object is demoted or denigrated by an exclusive focus upon circulation, reception, and subjective response. She is committed to achieving a synthesis of theory and artistic practice, one in which the purpose of theory is both to render advanced art intelligible and, for artists, to generate new avenues of artistic practice."

This stance is admirable but "dance on camera" is one art that has had little analysis and, until recently, sparse circulation. The practitioners of this burgeoning art are largely self-taught. With the exception of the dance and films of Yvonne Rainer and Maya Deren, barely any writing exists on the century-old art form of dance on camera. Not enough presenters took the "risk" of presenting this genre; few film or dance departments recognized dance on camera as a valid course of study, so few scholars took the trouble to dig in. Uday Shankar's Kalpana, a legendary film made in India in 1947, is a case in point. This two-and-a-half-hours film has sets like those of Metropolis and dances as majestic as those made by Busby Berkeley, a dark political wit and surrealism that Hollywood never dared. Who celebrated this film that director Satayit Ray saw 17 times? Sadly Ravi Shankar's older brother Uday, with whom he toured the world, died an embittered, lonely man. Kalpana is finally getting a long-overdue celebratory showing in New York City this May after fifty-years' absence.

One could project that dance on camera has had a sadly low profile because dance is associated with women and the film industry is still largely male-dominated. The great innovator Maya Deren died young, exhausted, and wondering why her films never won much financial support or circulation. Martina Kudlacek's feature-length documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2001) "is a revelation of how central dance was to Deren's being, creativity, and films, and thus to the foundations of the American avant-garde film movement," wrote filmmaker/writer Amy Greenfield.

Forty years before Maya Deren's time, the immediacy and emotional power of dance had been embraced. The lure of the body in the vaudevillian era was irresistible to directors. But when the talkies came in and actors got ready for their close-ups, directors strangely became timid about shooting the full body. Yes we had the magic years of Fred Astaire and Stanley Donen's ingenuous direction, but the subtle expression of every man's hands, hips, his walk, his rhythm was largely ignored by Hollywood. Even though every magazine and ad flaunts naked bodies, the film industry is oddly intimidated by bodies--in motion, or still. Would anyone admit to this fundamental directors' block?

Once video cameras and affordable editing software became available in the mid-80s, dancers around the world re-discovered the obvious chemistry between dance and the camera. The explosion of explorations into comic essays, surreal narratives, poetic fantasies, multi-media performance, environmental live/screen events attest to the vast potential of combining dance and film. Each dance video seems to operate within a universe of its own logic. To cite a few examples, Barbara Walter's 20/20 ran a story on February 14, 2003--sandwiched in between segments on Saddam Hussein--on Pretty Big Dig (a trio for three John Deere tractors choreographed directed by Anne Troake, produced by Bravo!FACT in Toronto). Troake went to heavy equipment training school to achieve this graceful waltz. This year's Dance On Camera Festival jury winner from Ireland Hit and Run is a brilliant coordination of cinematography, environment, movement and character shot in a derelict urban jungle.

Another festival favorite Black Spring (a Nigerian/French production by L'Heure d'Ete; Benoit Dervaux and Heddy Maalen, directors) interweaves movement and stillness with painterly scenes of life in an African shantytown. Goshogaoka, made by American artist Sharon Lock-hart, shot in Japan in 1997, is a meditative look at the exercises of a junior high school girls' basketball team. The camera sits as still as a Buddha, but as the film rolls on with six ten-minutes' takes, the scene subtly shifts into an abstract realm.

Slowly dance on camera is gathering press and global exposure. In 2002, the Routledge publishing company publicized Envisioning Dance for Film and Video, a book and DVD including 60 essays from filmmakers, choreographers, and producers. The 31-year-old Dance On Camera Festival toured internationally to Russia, Poland, Mexico, Uruguay and across the states. Monaco Dance Forum in Monte Carlo gathered directors of dance film festivals from around the world to determine ways of collaborating. The distributor First Run Features released a dvd of dance video shorts that collectively won seventeen international awards. The San Francisco International Film Festival wrote in 1998 of the Swiss dance film, Reines d'un jour, directed by Pascal Magnin that "no art form has shown more vitality or greater innovation in recent years."

The genre of dance video may not have an army of theorists and legions of followers, the practitioners can draw from the vast treasure of ideas already explored. Maya Deren made us consider how to "make the world dance" and subtly suggested how to captivate rather than overtly entertain the viewer. Yvonne Rainer made us question the logic of any single movement whether of the body or the camera. She bluntly broke down our expectations to free us from a sing-along sense of anticipation. Georges Melies, Sergei Eisenstein, Busby Berkeley, Charlie Chaplin, Kurosawa, all learnt and taught how to integrate the language of the body into film, and how to build rhythm and counter-rhythms from frame to frame.

A successful dance film is incredibly difficult to achieve because the energy of dance is so elusive; it refuses to be captured. The body in motion simply evokes too much to be contained. But what can be conveyed is the essential mystery of being, the ambiguity of any gesture, the beauty, the grace and vitality of a well-trained dancer. And gratefully what is so hard to achieve on stage but much more manageable on screen is humor. With the tools of an editor, the capabilities to play with juxtapositions and locations, these dance films are often brimming with ideas, wit, and subtlety.

For more information on the upcoming Dance On Camera Festival and other events, contact [e-mail] or visit our website: www.dancefilmsassn.org