On Watching Screendance

Sherril Dodds, Temple University

Abstract
In this provocation, I ask what is it to watch screendance, what is at stake, and what
comes into play? I suggest that in identifying works as examples of “dance on screen”,
we enter into a complex history of aesthetic innovations, marketing criteria, funding
systems, and intellectual debates. I compare the viewing practices of film, television and
the internet, and consider how different screen formats shape experiences of teaching
and research. I reflect upon the ethics of participation in online debates, and suggest
that the modes and stakes of watching are as important as the dance itself.

Keywords: watching, research, teaching, consumption, participation

What is it to watch?
What is at stake?
What comes into play?

To say that we are watching screendance assumes that we can identify the very
character of screendance. Operational categories certainly exist that organize
screendance into generic groupings: dance documentary, film musical, pop music
video, dance commercial, reality television show, dance for camera, Bollywood film,
television adaptation, experimental dance film, TV dance competition, Hollywood
dance film, dance animation, and so on. Yet the borders of these typologies fail to hold
as tropes and techniques slip from one category to another. Boundaries become fluid
and genres resist easy definition. And while the term “screendance” might serve as a
useful placeholder that gently and inclusively holds together a multitude of screen
works that feature “dance,” it may also include representations that complicate
common conceptions of dance. Such screen works do not necessarily employ explicit
images of dancing people, but instead are attentive to the choreographic sensibilities
of film-making (the movement of the camera and rhythm of the cut) and the quality of
movement per se (the motion of inanimate objects or non-human mobile subjects).
Therefore in naming our viewing choice as screendance, we enter into a complex
history of aesthetic innovations, marketing criteria, funding systems, and intellectual
debates. For artists and scholars, the naming and claiming of screendance gives
visibility to that which we hold dear both aesthetically and politically.

The International Journal of Screendance 10 (2019). https://doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v10i0.6726

© 2019 Dodds. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
DODDS: ON WATCHING SCREENDANCE 142

Opportunities to watch screendance differ considerably from when and how I watched
it as a young viewer to how I watch it now. As a child I walked to our local cinema to
witness the spectacle of dance in the movies, often returning at a later date for a repeat
viewing of my favorite dance films. Alternatively, I scoured through the entertainment
sections of the newspaper to catch television programs that featured dance. In my
teens, the luxury of home video allowed the opportunity to sit by the VHS player all set
to press “record” seconds before the television show started, and then watch these
scratchy images many times over. While a graduate student, in my mid-twenties, I
needed to employ social and economic capital to study the screendance to which I
would otherwise have limited or no access. A friend who worked in advertising
managed to find out which agency had produced a Hellmann’s mayonnaise commercial
that featured dance. I called the agency, tracked down the person who negotiated the
“spot times” during which the ads would run, and then dutifully set my video machine
to record them, keeping my fingers crossed that the information was accurate. I rang
several travel agencies to find the cheapest return airfare to Monaco so that I could
attend the annual IMZ Dancescreen festival, spending almost the entire three days
isolated in small viewing cubicles so that I could watch as many of the entries as
possible, the majority of which would never be screened on British television. I made
extensive notes trying to imprint the style and content of punchy little dance films onto
my mind’s eye. And through a wonderful connection, brokered by my dissertation
adviser, to BBC television producer Bob Lockyer, I gained a day’s access to the BBC
archives where I watched grainy black and white recordings of dance films from the
mid-twentieth century. On the bus home, I read through more reams of notes and
carefully held on to a VHS copy of Houseparty (1964), an early example of dance
designed for television, that the BBC archivist had kindly run off for me. The magic of
those one-off viewings and the satisfaction of watching poor quality video recordings
many times over characterized my early research life.

As I entered university teaching in the late 1990s, the technical paraphernalia of how to
enable my students to watch screendance proved equally challenging. I would prepare
for lectures by sitting in a large closet that served as the dance department video library
diligently compiling video clips onto a single VHS tape as someone had managed to
hook up two recorders that enabled tape-to-tape recording. I spent hours fast-
forwarding, rewinding and recording in private, but at least this saved the awkward time
in a class fumbling around with multiple tapes or holding down the fast-forward button
to cycle through different sections of a dance. Even as DVDs became commercially
available, the temperamental university machines would not always play them or allow
me to cue a certain point in a dance. And although I had built up a huge personal video
library neatly catalogued through a numerical system that tallied with hand-written
index cards that detailed the title, dance company, director, choreographer, creation
date, and other pertinent information, I ditched the entire collection when I relocated
to the United States. The loss of my precious video archive still gives me shivers,
DODDS: ON WATCHING SCREENDANCE 143

however most universities no longer provide video players in their classrooms, and my
British PAL tapes were not compatible with the American NTSC machines. While I had
been slowly transferring some of my most beloved recordings onto DVD in the year or
so prior to my departure, most of these now sit in the bottom of my office filing cabinet
as the US region 1 players at my university will not accommodate my European region
2 discs. Although I am a little sad about this, and want to recognize the emotional
relationship that we invest in the physical artifacts that facilitate our teaching and
research, the development of digital technologies and the internet have utterly
transformed what we watch and how we watch screendance.

On arriving in the United States in 2011, I decided at that point that I would no longer
mess around with tapes and discs, but would only use teaching materials that I could
access online. The sheer quantity of screendance available online, through free video
platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo and curated subscription sites such as Alexander
Street, proves almost overwhelming. Indeed the shift from scanning the newspapers for
rare glimpses of screendance to the deluge of dance through digital means is
staggering. While this greater level of access to watching, making, and learning dance
has sometimes been couched within a rhetoric of democratization, this needs to be
accompanied with caution. Some sections of the population either remain without
access to, or elect not to engage with, the internet, although it is widely available in
schools, universities, and public libraries. And though many sites are open access, some
require membership fees, thus excluding those with limited economic means.

In addition to increased availability of screendance, greater opportunities to engage in

its production have come about through low-cost digital recording devices that we can
carry around in our pockets. Again, not everyone has access to smartphones or GoPros;
however, a substantial proportion of the population has the capacity to capture dance
images on screen whether simply pointing and shooting dance at a family wedding or
using playful production techniques to curate and manipulate moving bodies.
Consequently, greater access to the means of production enables voices and bodies to
be seen and heard that may have otherwise been overlooked through the taste and
value structures of a limited pool of commissioning editors responsible for screendance
within public broadcasting networks. A similar sense of diversification comes about
through the ways in which we might learn dance through screen tutorials. Whereas
throughout the 1980s and 90s, a limited number of commercially available dance
instruction videos benefited from mass circulation through those with concomitant
social and economic capital (although dances were also transmitted within grassroots
communities through DIY video-making), we can now access tutorials on just about any
topic imaginable through amateur teaching on YouTube. Though we always need to
check the authority and expertise of dance teaching, the abundance of online videos
affords us plenty of opportunity for cross checking and validating the reliability of
sources.
DODDS: ON WATCHING SCREENDANCE 144

Yet the excess, the overload, and the seemingly infinite leave me unsettled. I am no
longer left hungry for more, but instead feel utterly saturated. This endless quantity
clearly re-shapes how I watch. While the big screen continues to thrive, the option to
‘watch again’ through Netflix or Hulu leaves me spoilt for choice and struggling to
decide what to watch. I see people watching feature films on tablets, laptops and
phones in bright and bustling public environments far removed from the quiet intimacy
of a blacked-out movie theater. While I want to avoid the simplistic binary that cinema
spectatorship always ensures a focused and complete viewing experience whereas
watching television or the digital screen is distracted and fragmented in comparison,
the range of options regarding what and where we watch makes me think twice about
contemporary viewing habits. I fear my capacity to sit and watch carefully is usurped by
the need to scan quickly and keep moving through the virtual viewing landscape. I
worry that my patience and tolerance are constantly tested and that, unless a film can
hold my attention through novelty, brevity, and spectacle then I will move on to the
next piece of click bait. Of course I need to remind myself that as a dance researcher
with my own values and interests, I might attentively watch a long passage of
screendance (such as a poor resolution and fixed camera recording of an entire hip-hop
battle) that would be of little interest to those outside this taste community. The point
is that it is available. Furthermore, I can easily locate all manner of dance commercials,
music videos, and experimental dance films that were extremely difficult to track down
twenty-five years ago. Although I keep returning to the caveat that not all dance is
accessible online and not all people have online access, exponentially more
screendance exists in the digital realm than in the analog days of my early research. The
research process might be less exciting, but the research findings remain so.

Excitement aside, I also think about the ethics of our engagement with screendance
online. Unlike cinema and television, online spectatorship frequently offers space for
feedback and commentary. A quick glance through the viewer comments posted below
video clips reveals all kinds of wonderful and wacky responses that range from truly
enlightened to horribly toxic, depending upon one’s position and politics. This prompts
me to question whether watching should be an end in itself or whether we should frame
our response in dialogue with other spectators. When dance clips are taken out of
context or comments reveal naïve assumptions or dangerous perceptions about dance
on screen, do we have an ethical responsibility to intervene? In a digital landscape in
which images and words, spectatorship and interpretation, are placed in such close
relationship, do we simply approach this material as valuable research data or do we
take on the role of expert interlocutors willing to inform and take a stand? This might
depend on whether our emotional and intellectual investments are resilient enough to
withstand all kinds of voices and perceptions, which can speak loudly and forcibly in the
digital realm. Yet another option asks us to wait patiently until new screendance work
begins to circulate that speaks back to us through the artistry and motion of its own
visual and kinetic language. The work itself then enters into conversation with what has
DODDS: ON WATCHING SCREENDANCE 145

come before. Whether we speak our politics blatantly or live them quietly through how
we move in the world, we take a position on the screendance that surrounds us: we
choose what, how, where, when and why we watch.

The screen clearly orients us to watch dance under specific historical, technological, and
social conditions, which in turn shape how we invest in and value screendance, our
practices of spectatorship, and how we might learn from it or share it with others.
Through understanding these frameworks of consumption, reception, and
participation, we then have the option to choose how we engage with screendance and
to what end. Often students joke that I have killed any pleasure in watching as I redirect
their attention to the technical and aesthetic apparatus that construct images of dance
on screen, thus bringing into focus the politics of representation. While I try to reassure
them that they can still indulge in scopic pleasures and spectacular desires, film studies
tells us that visual pleasure is itself a social construction. Contemporary audiences are
fortunate to have an excess of screendance from different historical eras, national
contexts, and of diverse artistic styles that satisfy a wide spectrum of tastes and interests.
For screendance studies, however, thinking about the modes and stakes of watching is
perhaps as important as the dance itself.

Biography
Sherril Dodds is a Professor of Dance at Temple University. Her books include Dance on
Screen (2001), Dancing on the Canon (2011), Bodies of Sound (co-edited with Susan C.
Cook, 2014), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition (2019) and The Bloomsbury
Companion to Dance Studies (2019). She has been a visiting scholar at Trondheim
University in Norway, Griffith University in Australia, Stanford University in the USA, and
Blaise-Pascal University in France. She was awarded the 2015 Gertrude Lippincott prize
for her article, ‘The Choreographic Interface: Dancing Facial Expression in Hip Hop and
Neo-burlesque striptease’.

Email: sherril.dodds@temple.edu

Reference
Houseparty (1944). Dir. Margaret Dale. TV movie. 1964. BFI.