Ballroom, Melbourne.
November 27, 2024.
In early 2015, I had the pleasure of seeing the first edition of Sue Healey Viewing Dance Massive music festival in Melbourne. Later that year, in In an interview with Dance Informa, she told me, “I like the gap between truth and reality andreal. While theater plays with this all the time, dance maybe not because it’s a very “now” art form. But once you bring in the photographed body, it gives you a lot of other things to play with.
Nearly a decade later, at the same venue, Healey’s now long-running Screen Project is back as part of next year’s Dance (Lens) event. Shown alongside work by Siobhan Murphy do a good job Also Coby Ogg and Alice Cummins terra (installed in 2024)which once again highlights the potential and problems of dance in film.
As an ephemeral art form and an almost universal means of expression, dance is primarily located in the present moment and in the body. Unlike music, there is no standard notation that can be easily copied. (Nor are its recordings ubiquitous or beloved.) The routines we see in Hollywood and Bollywood productions and K-pop videos, or on the shiny floors of specialty television, are very rarely pierces the surface of virtuosity, and is almost never that visceral and engaging.
However, the camera is an extraordinary pair of eyes. It looks at things in a less human way. Therefore, it provides a different look. In dance, this often translates into close-ups, slow motion, and changes in position. While filmmakers may have a more flexible toolkit (including all the tricks of post), the creative challenge is not just capturing or editing, but using the medium as a form of choreography.
Of the three works screened as part of moving portraitonly Healy’s comes close to this. Although both do a good job and Terra Both are well-crafted, carefully constructed films, and they both highlight the stage/screen rift. They remain dry, flat, moving to nowhere, not a dance, not a movie. As art, they feel like a hard surface, a white-walled gallery that leaves you scratching your chin and wondering if you’re missing something.
In contrast, View:Image Lush, human, elegant, and (despite its more documentary form) danceable. I mean, the six 10-minute vignettes that make up this piece are a dance in themselves. Together with cinematographer Judd Overton and composer Darin Verhagen, Healy has created one of the most elegant and beautiful selections of dance shorts you could ever hope to see.
She’s helped in this by the incredible dancers she plays, all of whom are “icons” in the Australian industry. As a result, her films have a lot of personality. Not only that, there is a feeling present. It’s as if the fourth wall is porous and the frame is dancing. In fact, sometimes you wonder if she and her collaborators are approaching a new dance language.
Having said so much, what? moving portrait It also makes clear that we, as audiences, may need to change the way we view dance. What yes and no Dancing etc? Some of the inherent problems faced by dance film creators lie in our common preconceptions about both art forms. Although the movie about The dance is relatively simple and rich, and the movie yes Dancing is much harder.
In presenting these works, Dancehouse invites us to re-examine what we think is possible in choreography and photography. Even if some combinations don’t land, it’s clear that the act of translation is a tango in itself. Push and pull may not always create harmony, but even when it missteps, it leads us somewhere; the most pertinent question may well be: can we follow?
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
