Making Video Dance

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dance for the Screen (2nd ed)

Katrina McPherson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138699120
• eBook ISBN: 9781315452630
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Making Video Dance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dance for the Screen is the first workbook to follow the entire process of video dance production: from having an idea, through to choreographing for the screen, filming and editing, and distribution. In doing so, it explores and analyses the creative, practical, technical, and aesthetic issues that arise when making screen dance.

This rigorously revised edition brings the book fully up to date from a technical and aesthetic point of view, and includes:

• An extended exploration of improvisation in the video dance-making process
• New writing about filming in the landscape
• Additional writing on developing a practice and working with scores and manifestos
• Updated information about camera use, including filming with mobile phones
• A step-by-step guide to digital non-linear editing of screen dance
• Ideas for distribution in the 21st century
• Insights into Katrina's own screen dance practice, with reference to specific works that she has directed and which are available to view online
• New and revised practical exercises
• New illustrations specially drawn for this edition

CHAPTER 1

Getting Started

As we will see throughout the course of this book, whatever the scale of your project, the process of making video dance involves the weaving together of various aesthetic and practical elements, often involving numerous people, ideas, places and equipment along the way.

It may be that the project that you are embarking on is the first experience you have ever had of making work for the screen. It may be part of a college course or workshop or an artist commission. It may involve working as a collaborative team or fulfilling all the roles yourself. You may have a budget or be working with borrowed equipment off your own back. No matter what the situation or context, the process of making video dance is made a lot easier with a clear idea to guide you and it is with this that we will start the process.

Expressed Intention

We make work to be experienced by others.

Our work needs to draw people in and take them on a journey.

It must intrigue, fascinate, entertain, inspire, challenge, provoke and move.

Above all, it must communicate.

What it communicates is your choice.

You might want to tell a particular story or to present the life of a character or group of characters. You might want to create a certain mood or quality. You might want to express a particular concept or break new ground in terms of the art form.

It is possible – in fact, it is likely – that you might want to do a number of the above and maybe more.

When you start to make a new piece of work, you may not know exactly what the finished work will look or sound like, how long it will be, nor its shape or structure and that is fine. But what is vital is that you are clear of your intention.

Your intention is the core idea of your work, the concept that holds everything together. Being clear in your intention will help you maximise the options and negotiate the obstacles that you may come across in the process of making the work. It will help you decide what is right and what is wrong for your video dance.

However, the wonderful thing about making art is that, no matter how clear your intention or specific your ideas are, once the work goes out into the world, how it is received, interpreted and understood by those who engage with it is largely beyond your control. The viewer’s life experiences will determine what they take from the work.

Your role as an artist is to offer up something that merits the attention of others and which does so with originality, honesty and clarity.

Different Starting Points

Every video dance needs an idea to start it off.

It might be a story or a dramatic situation. It might be another work of art, for example, the paintings of a particular artist or era, a film or a piece of music. It might also be a movement concept, a camera or editing technique, or a specific location that offers up an idea.

Some of the most usual starting points for video dance are:

• Performance

• Themes

• Stories

• Formal

• Landscape, environment and design

• Aural

Performance

One might say that performance is at the heart of all video dance – whoever is in front of the camera communicates to the viewer most of all. I often say that this is where it all starts for me. Many of the video dance works that I have directed have had their beginning in the desire to work with a particular performer or group of performers and this, I believe, puts them and their presence at the heart of the work. Everything else builds from the decision to work together and the resulting collaboration.

Themes

The theme of a work is an overarching subject to which all aspects of the work relate. Choosing a theme as the starting point for your video dance helps you to be clear about the essence of the work, whilst at the same time enabling your imagination and creativity to expand and elaborate beyond any literal depiction of the idea.

Themes can be:

• Emotional – for example, loss or joy

• Experiential – for example, speed, transformation, flight

• Symbolic – for example, one against many, the search for love

• Physical – for example, water, earth, gravity

• Action-based – for example, climbing, running, falling, swooping

A theme can be tackled in very different ways. The theme of ‘transformation’ could be represented by:

• A story in which a frog changes into a prince.

• Editing, in which one type of material – for example, a woman performing a solo shot in close up – is gradually replaced by another – perhaps a wide shot of the same dancer, dressed in a different costume, dancing a duet with another dancer.

The creativity is in exploring how a theme might be represented through different ways, so, for example, ‘joy’ could be developed through the idea of weightlessness, which involves the exploration of gravity, as represented by video dance footage which has been filmed entirely with the camera upside down.

In a theme-based video dance, all aspects of the process, including the dancers’ movement, the design and framing of each shot and the editing are developed to represent an overall theme of the work.

When making Moment, a video dance that I produced and directed in 1999, I took as the starting point the theme of ‘time’ and our perception of it. Inspired by the tragically early death of a friend, the young dancer/film-maker Michele Fox at the age of 30, I contemplated the idea that our experience of the passage of time is affected by the personal significance of the different moments. Mostly, time fleets by unnoticed. However, there are some moments that take on deep significance, for example, the moment of birth or of death or when we meet a lover or another significant person for the very first time. In Moment (1999), the theme of time is explored through the repetition of shots and movement performed for the camera (repeated time), slow motion and reversed motion shots in the edit (speed-altered time), as well as through the improvisation of camera and dancers, which are unique moments in time being ‘captured’ for eternity.

Stories

A story – or ‘narrative’ – describes a sequence of events.

Most often, stories are about characters in specific situations and their interaction and developing relationships.

Video dance works often take stories as their starting point. There are a few reasons for this:

• People like stories. We tell, read and listen to stories all the time: in the news and newspapers, books, at the cinema, online and on television. We even recount the fragmented images of our dreams in story-form over the breakfast table.

• Traditionally film and television have been used as the vehicle for telling stories and, as a result, we feel comfortable when we recognise a familiar approach to the screen-based medium, even if the dialogue that we might usually expect is absent.

The stories you choose to base your work on can be:

• Taken from the world around you.

• Inspired by fairy tales, fables and myths.

• Based on historical lives and events.

• Drawn from your own experiences.

• Flow from your imagination or dreams.

In most feature and short films, stories have a clear sense of beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily presented in that order.

Perhaps because of its ability to communicate beyond words, stories in video dance can be less defined and more dream-like than dialogue-based films typically are. Using movement as the core medium allows a reimagining of story structure, which can remain intriguingly ambiguous and unresolved. This is one of the characteristics that I enjoy most about making video dance – that you can explore different ways and the extent to which your story is communicated through the medium of movement on the screen.

Character is also a starting point that is very linked to both performance and to story. You can create a character that then interacts with the world to form a narrative for your video dance.

A distinction can also be made between ‘fiction’, in which the video dance work presents a made-up world and characters and ‘narrative’ or story-based, in which a series of events unfold on-screen, thereby telling a story.

Formal

Works arising from formal ideas take their inspiration from the technical and material possibilities of the art form. The starting point is not an external subject, but rather the medium itself and how it is explored becomes the subject of the work.

Formal ideas can often be initiated by questions. For example:

• What happens if the camera is always in motion?

• How do we represent speed on screen?

• What is the effect of a series of repeated images?

Formal ideas can also be based on restrictions on, for example, how the dancers move, how the camera is used, how the material will be edited, or a combination of all three. You might:

• Set off to explore what happens if you only ever see a particular body part in the frame – for example, faces, hands or feet.

• Set a rule that your video dance will last the length of one continuous zoom in of the lens and create the dancers’ choreography around that shot.

• Plan to explore the effect of looping and repetition in the edit, where sequences are created by dropping and replacing shots, according to preconceived mathematical patterns.

Another aspect to a formal approach can be taking a technical innovation as a starting point. For example, the super high-definition cameras such as the Phantom have inspired artists to make work that explores what is revealed through the razor-sharp images and possibilities for extreme slow motion that are offered by this technology.

Similarly, devices that enable the camera to behave in particular ways can present all sorts of interesting ideas to be explored. This might be a specific piece of equipment that allows some smooth, fast or tricky camera movement, the size of a camera or the type of lens that results in a particular look or feel. We will look in more detail at different types of cameras, lenses, formats and other equipment in later chapters of this book, however, it is good to be aware that these different aspects of the medium can provide a useful starting point for a new piece of work

Landscape, Environment and Design

It may be that the first ideas for your video dance are inspired by an environment or visual image:

• This may be a particular location, like a beach or a flight of stairs.

• A specific object, like a chair, a table or a coil of rope.

• A piece of clothing, such as a suit, a pair of gloves or a dress.

• A combination of a number of such elements.

As we will see, all video dance-making involves location, design and costume to a certain extent and we will look into this in greater depth in later chapters. However, in some work, these elements provide the starting point and everything else – choreography, camera, editing and sound – stems from there.

A very particular concept of landscape was the starting point of Coire Ruadh, which I co-directed with Simon Fildes in 2015. At the time, we were intrigued by a particular piece of scientific environmental research in which areas of the Scottish Highlands had been identified as being ‘wild land’, based on a specific set of criteria that included both physical data and more subjective perceptions. We were inspired to visit, then film along the line of a particular hillside that had been mapped as being the border between ‘wild’ and ‘not wild’.

Having taken this concept as the starting point for a new work, we invited three dance artists – Frank McConnell, Robbie Synge and Ruth Jensen – who we knew each had particular charisma, sensitivity and skill in improvisation, to come to that particular place individually, for them and me to improvise with performance and camera in the space, responding in the moment t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Making Video Dance
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• From Los Angeles to Monte Carlo by Ellen Bromberg
• How Did We Get Here? Some Thoughts on Making Dance for Television by Bob Lockyer
• Notes on Using the Exercises
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Revised Edition
• Introduction to the Original Edition
• 1 Getting Started
• 2 Dance and the Camera
• 3 Developing the Work
• 4 Creating Your On-Screen World
• 5 Next Steps
• 6 When Filming Begins
• 7 Light, Sound and Camera Movement
• 8 Preparing to Edit
• 9 Choreography of the Edit
• 10 Final Stages
• 11 Out in the World
• Glossary
• Contributors
• Resources and Bibliography
• Index