When Is an Occasion for Dance Film?

Charles Atlas, From an Island Summer (still), 1983–84. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

This week we publish an essay by Dylan Sherman accompanying Rehearsal Behavior, a screening series co-curated by Andrea Torres and Charlotte Strange, tracing exchanges across generations of artists working between dance and experimental cinema. Through films by Guillaume Dustan, Amy Greenfield, and Charles Atlas, Sherman examines how filming itself enters the choreographic process, reshaping relationships among performers, filmmakers, and their wider circles of friendship. As part of the series, e-flux Screening Room presents Shirley Clarke’s A Moment in Love (1956) and Chantal Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked… (1983) on September 17 (details). The program continues on September 19 with Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers (1972), followed by an in-person conversation with the artist, moderated by David Velasco (details).

“The dance = years of work to get to this point—my brain’s dancing, never been so free.”1

So writes Guillaume Dustan on Songs in the key of moi, his 2000 autoportrait in which he gets high and films himself in his apartment over the course of a night-into-morning bender. It is one of 19 films the writer shot on a camcorder from 2000 to 2004, which he did not edit and never screened during his lifetime. Zoomed-in body parts of a nude lover make a few appearances, but for the most part it’s just Dustan and his queer world, which he pans over and zooms into in rhythm with the tracks he plays on his turntable. When he happens upon his own image, he’s always dancing.

Dustan’s nocturnal antics make me recall one of my own formative encounters with the medium of dance film, albeit in very different circumstances. As a ballet student and proud balletomane in high school, I often navigated to a shady website just before bedtime to commence glacially slow torrents of performance broadcasts from the Royal Ballet, my favorite company, that would be ready by the time I woke up.

Transmissions of these large-scale productions brought me closer into their choreographed worlds via visually pleasing close-up shots that revealed precise footwork and slow pans that kept star dancers in focus as they traversed the stage. Such carefully planned cinematography reflects dance’s close relationship to film that extends back to the dawn of the medium—Thomas Edison made his short film Annabelle Butterfly Dance in 1894, a year before the Lumière brothers hosted the world’s first film screening. Here, as in the Royal Ballet broadcasts I coveted over a century later, Edison creates a transmittable and commodifiable record of a dance.

On the flip side, there is an emancipatory power to the genre (variously referred to as dance film, dance for camera, and screendance) that emerges when the camera precedes choreography as the occasion for dance. Liberated from the restrictions of a preconceived score, movement unfurls into a series of prosocial moments that reveal not only why we are compelled to dance in the first place, but the wider milieu that undergirds the practice of performance. The relationship between those behind and in front of the camera breaks open the binary between subject and director and moves toward an unstable field where authorship is in constant negotiation.

Such fluidity can be seen in Dustan’s auto-world. In the opening sequence of Songs in the key of moi, his camcorder pulses across his extensive collection of printed gay erotica with devotional reverence, as if he is dancing with the ephemera of his domestic milieu. About halfway through the film, we see Dustan’s face for the first time as he holds his camera steady in a mirror and studies the contours of his reflection, both in the mirror and in his device’s tiny screen. While Dustan may be seduced by his own mediated image for a moment, he ultimately gives in to the rhythm of a track by the pop-rock duo Les Rita Mitsouko, setting his camera in a looping motion that spirals in and around the initial point of contact with the mirror. There is no delay or planning between motion and capture: Dustan is immediately in sync with his own image as he enhances, even rescues, the pleasure of dance and performance from the perils of its capture. He endured neither rehearsal nor multiple takes to arrive at Songs in the key of moi. He is only dancing here, in this moment, “never been so free.”

Amy Greenfield chases a similar sensation of corporeal liberation in her silent black and white 1973 film Element. She navigates a mud field in the nude by crawling, rolling, walking, running, and slithering, but above all by falling, over and over and over again. She relates to the substance with a primordial rawness reminiscent of similarly bold performances by her feminist contemporaries such as Carolee Schneemann and Charlotte Moorman. As Greenfield explains, “I’d never felt such a release from normal laws of gravity. It was like doing the simplest movements for the first time, but here on earth, not on the moon.”2  

Greenfield is both performer and director in Element, a duality she achieved by working with Hilary Harris, the director of the noted 1966 experimental dance film Nine Variations on a Dance Theme, as her camera operator. As Greenfield goes deeper and deeper into the mud, Harris’s camera zooms in on the bulges and bubbles that ooze from the field and Greenfield’s body, defamiliarizing individual parts while also affirming their movement as choreography in its own right. Indeed, the close-up is a key and recurrent feature of experimental dance films that distinguishes them from what Erin Brannigan calls “action-based dance films such as musicals and ballet recordings, which tend to document virtuosic feats in long-shot.”3 Harris’s camera estranges the viewer from but also pulls them deeper into the squelchy terrain of Greenfield’s performance. While we are not privy to the sounds of this patch of mud or what lies beyond it, we are uniquely attuned to the micro-topographies that form on Greenfield’s writhing figure. 

I first read these frames as reflecting Harris’s subjective record of the performance, assuming that he had operated independently from Greenfield. This turned out to be both true and untrue upon further research. In Element’s production notes, Greenfield explains how “I found that inside my head I would ‘see’ as I moved … when we’d look at the rushes together in between our once-weekly shoots, I could see where there was a correspondence between the image that was in my head and the actual film footage. When I saw it, or close to it, I’d say, ‘go with that.’ Then after awhile Hilary was just there all the time.”4 This remarkable progression, with Harris starting as a camera operator who observed Greenfield’s process from the outside and ending up as an intuitive collaborator who anticipated how she wanted to be seen, reflects the social bonds that develop between the scenes of filming dance. 

The field of collaboration is opened wider still in Charles Atlas’s 1983-84 From an Island Summer. Atlas’s technical approach—filming on 16mm that is later transferred to video—bridges the gap between Element’s celluloid origins and Songs in the key of moi’s Y2K digitality and reflects how the overall genre of dance film is in constant dialogue with (and sometimes even drives forward) technological advances in the moving image. From an Island Summer’s transitional medium further underscores how Atlas was on the forefront of video dance as the filmmaker in residence for Merce Cunningham’s company from 1974 to 1983. This project sees Atlas moving away from this foundational relationship with the choreographer and toward a range of projects with his friends from performance, nightlife, and music. Not yet one year out from the company, Atlas starts close to home: his friend and former Cunningham dancer Karole Armitage choreographed the film. She also jointly shares its copyright with Atlas and dances in it alongside Lita Bossert, Donald Byrd, Patrick McMullan, and Mary Beth Vishno.

Atlas’s motivation for creating From an Island Summer similarly emerges from a place of intimacy and proximity. As he shares, “I was thinking of my pieces as time capsules. I was making work about what was in my life. … We had about two days and a small NEA grant—not much money at all.”5 This limited timeframe becomes a generative force as six friends explore what a living document of their togetherness might look like. The opening scene on the Coney Island boardwalk, set to a boisterous salsa track by Henry Fiol, interpolates short, punchy movement phrases with passersby and scenic establishing shots. The next scenes further expand what can be defined as choreographic: the cast enjoys a series of spinning amusement park rides that Atlas captures from his position beside them, letting the mechanics of the ride determine his camera movement (a circular pleasure reminiscent of Dustan’s camera spiraling in the mirror or Greenfield’s repeated falls into the mud). At one point, the dancers dismount and Atlas becomes the sole one “dancing” as he captures fleeting glimpses of their stationary figures from the ride. 

Through these scenes, Armitage’s choreography is not just displaced from the studio—it becomes a strategy for navigating public space and a vehicle for exploring what a group of friends can accomplish in two days. Rather than being bound to the dancers, the potentiality of movement playfully volleys to and from the camera, suggesting that Armitage is choreographing Atlas as much as he is directing her. Such an eye-to-eye exchange is possible when a filmic scene emerges from a social scene, dancing together whether or not the camera is rolling. 

As these three filmmakers weave their cameras into choreographic processes in various stages of development, they work with not just a sequence of movements but a collective ethos. Dustan casts himself and his belongings as characters in a domestic drama, Greenfield merges her directorial eye with Harris’s, and Atlas figures out what is possible when his peers take the city as their stage. Here, dance film offers itself as a porous vessel for these collaborators to be together in time as they venture outside of conventional hierarchies of authorship and into the pleasures of each other’s presence.