Dancing the impossible choreography for the camera

Dance Magazine, Jan, 2005 by Lisa Kraus

Installations using dance on screen are a way for artists to reach museum-going audiences. Video artist Chloe Piene's Blackmouth, in the recent Whitney Biennial, catches the descent into wildness of a prepubescent girl in strobing slow motion. Her digitally altered cries deepen to lioness growls as she falls repeatedly, body muddied, and hair flailing. Videographer Douglas Rosenberg's works have been screened at the Dance Theater Workshop gallery and the Brooklyn Museum. His Venous Flow, made with choreographer Li-Chiao Ping, shows figures clothed in language--text covers bare backs and draping skirts, becoming readable only when the camera moves in close or an extended arm becomes a projection surface. Dealing with death, the piece is all black and white and hushed, with an occasional temple bell or personal testimony.

At MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, Laurie McLeod's LuoYong's Dream was shown at the end of a long outdoor corridor on a screen behind a wall of dripping water. The fourth of her underwater films, LuoYong's Dream features the Buddha-faced Chinese actor LuoYong Wang, who, in wafting crimson robes, wheels a bicycle and handles smooth stones, playing out submerged images from his dreams. Serene with its focus on the play of light through water and a haunting musical score, LuoYong's Dream creates such a visually lush space that we don't want to leave. "I think about the viewer's capacity for wonder and how to keep it refreshed," says McLeod.

Given the new possibilities of dance on screen, choreographers for the camera have a multitude of ways to keep us astonished.

Lisa Kraus, who teaches dance at Swarthmore College, has written for Contact Quarterly and The Philadelphia Inquirer.