Scotland’s festival of dance on screen est 2016. In partnership with Citymoves Dance Agency, Aberdeen since 2021. Curated by Simon Fildes and Iliyana Nedkova. Further support from Marlene Millar and Festival Quartiers Danses, Montreal

Let’s Write about Screen Dance

New critical writing on works and themes from the Screen.dance 2021 festival programme following the screen dance writing workshop led by Róisín O’Brien

BLACK STAINS

BÁRBARA JANICAS

The nature of screen dance might imply communication through bodies and movement, and discard the spoken word. But what if those bodies belong to people our society never listened to, nor saw as individuals? How can those bodies and voices, movements and words, be acknowledged again as human?

From the beginning, Tiffany Rhynard’s Black Stains takes the gamble and edits voices over dance to modern or rootsy percussive music. Black Stains ishalf-documentary, half-dance film; black and white close-up interviews with black men of different ages and backgrounds, alternate with dynamic and vibrant colour sequences of an all-male ensemble led by African-American choreographer Trent D. Williams, Jr.

When the men talk, they face the camera and hence the spectator, sharing poignant personal narratives that examine the systemic racism and police brutality against black people in the United States. But the dancers’ impromptu performances, filmed in different urban spaces, disclose an even more complex emotional landscape: as the film navigates through a garage, a basketball field, a decrepit squash court and a chapel with glass walls, these strong and robust bodies reveal strength and revolt as much as vulnerability and fear.

Each space inspires a different body and camera choreography, eliciting different kinesthetic responses from the viewer. We feel the despair of Trent D. Williams, Jr. in his nocturnal solo at the garage as the camera frantically revolves around him: more than once, he looks up, searching for a way out of his condition, then brutally falling on the ground.

We become aware of him feeling trapped as the camera captures him through the narrow cracks on the squash court’s walls, so high that he can barely see the sky. In the basketball field, where all the men get together as a tribe, the camera seems to get drunk from all the repressed feelings they share: athletic movements gradually merge into contemporary dance with flashes of street dance punctuated by bouncing jumps and punchier gestures. This scene is strikingly symbolic of America’s hypocrisy, as the men explain: the same society that judges them for the colour of their skin celebrates their strength and energy when it comes to sports.

Finally, at the church, they perform iterative jerky movements while sitting in the pews, as if trying to enact prayers of hope and justice, prayers that society refuses to listen to. Through physical activities and a spiritual gathering, they seek catharsis.

Black Stains dives into the reality of being black in the US with a strong sense of poetic honesty based on the complimentary relationship between dance and words. The dance does much more than illustrate what is said: it directly addresses the viewer’s body, calling for an empathetic response. By deciding to not only show but also directly tell the men’s stories, Black Stains makes a most salutary political gesture.

Before moving to Paris, Bárbara Janicas studied screenwriting at Lisbon Theatre and Film School and co-directed the dance documentary The Elder Body (2013), winning Best Portuguese Film Award at the 5th edition of InShadow Festival. She is now finishing her PhD thesis while teaching at the University Paris VIII. Her current research focuses on the relationship between experimental film and dance.

Let’s Write about Screen Dance

New critical writing on works and themes from the Screen.dance 2021 festival programme following the screen dance writing workshop led by Róisín O’Brien

HANDS ON

BÁRBARA JANICAS

‘This film is the result of tactile encounters’: this message appears on screen at the end of Marites Carino’s Hands On. For almost fifteen minutes, we’ve watched hands touching other hands, and listened to faceless voices briefly present themselves and describe how they felt as they got to know and communicate with others solely through blind touch. Blind dates for hands, one might say.

These hands belong to all kinds of people – young and old, men and women, black and white, and even tattooed – with different jobs, mostly ones that deal with bodies, manual activities or tactile sensations. Until the end, we barely see the people the hands belong to: sometimes, a backlit silhouetted body will appear, moving slowly as if feeling the air touching their skin. Even though the voices are present throughout the film, we gradually pay less attention to them and start concentrating on how the hands move and what sensations they arouse, both in the recipients and in ourselves, who are ‘only’ watching it.

Without potentially being aware of it, the people whose hands are filmed in close-up replicate a dynamic found in ‘contact-improvisation’. ‘Contact-improvisation’ is a dance practice that emerged in the 1970s and emphasizes the exploration of one’s body in relationship to others through touch, shared weight and movement awareness. Likewise, in the film, the participants guide and respond to the movements proposed by others playfully, gently surprising each other with new ways of interacting; ultimately, it is the spectator who witnesses dance emerging from these everyday gestures and tactile exploration.

Viewers unfamiliar with screen dance techniques might ask what this has to do with dance, since the spectator isn’t used to seeing the dancer’s body so closely when it is on stage. But hand choreographies are actually a recurring leitmotif in the history of screen dance. From Stella Simon’s Hände: Das Leben und die Liebe eines Zärtlichen Geschlechts from the late 1920s to Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie in the 1960s, hands shot in close up have filled the screens with romantic story-driven dances or more abstract, minimalist movements. However, in Marites Carino’s film, hands do not mimic human dancers, nor perform any kind of pre-determined choreography, thus expanding dance movement away from purely intentional, stylized, movement and proving that screen dance material can be found all around us.

By the end of the film, the hands are set apart and the device of the experiment is laid bare to the viewer. As people remove their eye bands and get to look for the first time at their duet partner, they have the most poignant and wonderful reactions. What seemed to have started as a kind of sociologic experiment and evolved as a micro-choreography of hands, turned out to be much more than that: a transcendental experience of intimacy and connection in this era of technology and social distancing, reminding us how important it is to still be able to take pleasure in the most basic ways of human communication.