ANATOMY OF A SCENE
June 29th, 2010Seattle Choreographers Discover the Seductive Freedom of Dancing for the Camera
By Adrian MacDonald
locust on stage with “Mockumentary.”
When Dayna Hanson, 44, formed the seminal Seattle dance company 33 Fainting Spells with partner Gaelen Hanson (no relation) some thirteen years ago, the two women immediately took a year-long residency at the European Dance Development Center in Anhem, Netherlands. In the school’s library, they discovered something strange, unique, and fascinating – a vast collection of European dance films, going back decades. The films were not simple documents of performances, nor were they documentary films about dance. They were an art form unto themselves, gripping narratives driven not by plot, dialogue, or characters, but by movement, music, choreography, and explorations of time and space.
Films like Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas (1983), a 57-minute film with no dialogue that follows the precise, synchronized movements of 4 dancers through a variety of institutional spaces, are known to European audiences for their absorbing cinematic flavor and dramatic content. In the dance world, Keersmaeker is a superstar with a marked dedication to strengthening relationships between choreographers, cinematographers, and composers, a combination through which she somehow pulls dazzling narrative out of seemingly mathematical and minimalistic movement.
Impressed by the films of Keersmaeker, Dutch choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, Slovenian dance troupe EN-KNAP, and several others, Dayna and Gaelen brought tapes of the works back to Seattle and in 1999 hosted a dance film festival called New Dance Cinema, held at the Northwest Film Forum. They would go on to hold 3 more editions of the festival, every other year until 2005. Among Seattle dancers and audiences, the events are widely credited with introducing the city to an art form that few if any knew existed.
“Up to the festival there was no dance filmmaking in Seattle,” Dayna says.
Seattle’s dancers and choreographers—of which the city has many—are in the midst of a new expansion of their medium into film and video, a move with dramatic consequences for the form at large. While local dancers have experimented with incorporating video into their live shows for several years (including Dayna’s own early 90’s arts collective Run/Remain, which combined theater, dance, film, text, and music), it was not until 33 Fainting Spells, and the modern revolution in low-cost filmmaking tools, that Seattle artists began to realize the full potential of choreography on screen.
“The thing that appeals to choreographers about dance film is you get to direct the eye of the viewer,” Dayna says. “You can control where they are looking, and how much detail they see. From 10 or 20 feet away people can look wherever they want. It’s kind of obvious, but it’s a huge thing for a choreographer to be able to shine a light on exactly what they want the audience to see.”
In another of film’s advantages, choreographers relish the opportunity to compose works in settings other than the traditional theater stage.
“I saw these films in the festival and was really excited that I didn’t have to be on stage,” says Karn Junkinsmith, 45, a choreographer who has danced in Seattle since the late 1980s. Her first short film, Day Off (2002), follows the adventures of a group of nuns who escape from a suburban convent and go in search of the beach.
Like others, Junkinsmith began experimenting with using video in her stage shows in the 1990s, using film to capture aspects of a performance otherwise inaccessible to the audience. Her 1990 piece “Girls Find Ways to Get There” included a screen behind the stage showing dancers from an aerial perspective, “like a Lawrence Welk circle dance.”
33 Fainting Spells’ Measure. Image by Alan Caudillo.
“Choreographing for the stage, directionally there is one point of view,” she says. “Dancers have front, back, side, turning, on and off stage, or they can go through the audience or drop from the ceiling. But in a dance film, it’s where is the camera going to be? You can direct their eye in a way you can’t do on stage.”
Seattle’s first ever stand-alone contribution to the dance film genre was a 7-minute short called Measure, made by 33 Fainting Spells shortly after the first edition of the New Dance Cinema festival. Working at the height of their internationally acclaimed career, Dayna and Gaelen made the piece with LA cinematographer Alan Caudillo, high production values, and 16mm film. It went on to premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival and show at festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Europe, Japan, and Australia. A nationally distributed DVD collection of short dance films called Dance for Camera included it as the sole work from the US.
Measure depicts Dayna and collaborator John Dixon in a long hallway, trading moves in a sort of dance conversation in four parts. As the conversation progresses, the moves become increasingly elaborate and synchronized, the camera cuts to close ups of the dancers’ facial expressions, and the film ends in some unusual editing cuts by local filmmaker Lynn Shelton. In 2001, a reviewer in The Stranger asked, “Did I simply miss the element of communication when I saw this duet on the stage, or is it really more pronounced in the cinematic version?”
The piece would prove groundbreaking, not only for its success as a film, but also for its influence on a generation of Seattle choreographers. Where the first edition of New Dance Cinema had no local films and the second had only Measure, Dayna says that by 2003 the festival had an entire program devoted to locally made films.
Among these were Day Off, as well as 33 Fainting Spells’ second film Entry, featuring the cinematography of local DP Ben Kasulke. Kasulke, who met Dayna and Gaelen working as a negative cutter on Measure, would soon after become the local dance world’s most in-demand DP, introducing scores of Seattle choreographers to the language of film.
“They kind of took a chance on me,” Kasulke says, attributing the choice to the fact that he may have been one of the few people around at the time with the training to shoot 16mm. “They were shooting on film at a time when no one else was. Without Dayna and Gaelen I wouldn’t even be working. Through helping them out, and through the word of mouth with their doing the film festival, my name started getting out there.”
Kasulke’s two-day shoot on Entry, his first major project out of college, got his work seen all over the world as the film made a similar festival run as Measure. Since, he has shot dozens of locally made dance and non-dance films alike.
“I don’t have any dance vocabulary, I was never an appreciator of modern dance for the stage,” he says. “It takes me a lot of time to figure out what the dancers are going for, or the vocabulary terms. But first time filmmakers have to do the same with film jargon. We’re translating each other’s language.”
The communication process can lead to experimenting with shooting techniques that a cinematographer would never try in a narrative feature, he says. “Dancers come from a totally different background, of space and body movement. There’s something in the translation of that to film that’s totally fascinating.”
Choreographers, at least in Seattle, tend to take one of two approaches to making a dance film, similar to the way they create a stage piece. In one, there are specific ingredients the choreographer is after that fit into a planned structure of narrative. Dayna’s and Gaelen’s pieces are typically this way, Kasulke says, as in Dayna’s recent solo stage piece “We Never Like to Think About the End.” For that, Kasulke shot interviews with people about near death experiences in “ethereal portraits,” which were later projected on stage.
Karn Junkinsmith’s Bus Stop. Image by Angela Esposito.
Measure and Entry also fall clearly into this category, as does a 2006 solo film by Gaelen, Your Lights Are Out or Burning Badly. The work consists entirely of a single linear piece of choreography shot on a traditional stage in an empty theater. The film premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival, and derives much of its power from the elegance of the choreography, the score using the song of the same name by local band Kinski, and the simplicity of the shooting style by local DP Lars Larson. (Gaelen has since left Seattle and was unavailable to comment for this article.)
The other approach to dance filmmaking is improvisational, in which choreographers and dancers go into a shoot with little besides props, costumes, and a location. Some of Dayna’s solo films have ventured into this territory, especially in collaboration with local filmmaker Linas Phillips (Walking to Werner, 2006). With EBE-4 (2005), Dayna appears with Phillips on a seagull-filled beach as the pair invoke Native American dancing and encounter an alien visitor.
“[EBE-4] is really strange, very improvised—the movement was barely set going into it,” Dayna says. “It’s a lovely little film but it was very difficult to edit. It’s not something I would do again.”
Other choreographers, such as Maureen Whiting, are more comfortable with the improvisational style and wouldn’t work any other way. Whiting normally does a “free for all shoot,” according to Kasulke, and then figures out a show later to go with it. He says the effect is similar to a sketchbook from which an artist later assembles a painting.
“Dance doesn’t translate to a lot of people, but give a dancer a movie camera, money, and time, and they feel the freedom to make what they want,” Whiting says. “What’s happening now is a range of people making their first film, all different.”
Whiting’s first venture into film was A Clear Day With No Memories (2002) with Cornish dance professor and videographer Bob Campbell, in which she choreographed a piece at Fort Warden, a historic 19th-century structure near Port Townsend. Soon after, the Northwest Film Forum selected her to participate in the Dancers Make Movies program it ran in 2002, in which 5 choreographers were each given a Super 8 camera, black and white film stock, and a brief shooting lesson, then told to make a film.
With collaborator Carolyn Lee, Whiting made Anchovy, a silent film in which she appears in large dark sunglasses and leg warmers, jumping up and down manically in an old garage and kneeling on the floor alternately licking sawdust, anchovies, and the candied eggs spitting from the back of a plastic wind-up duck.
(“I’m glad you’re laughing, it’s supposed to be funny,” she told me when I screened the film.)
In 2005, Whiting worked with Kasulke to make Bear Go Home, a film in which very little human movement actually occurs and the shots pan primarily over props, location, and costume. Whiting’s face appears frequently in close up wearing heavy makeup and flower petal eyelashes. In other scenes she lies on the floor in a white bear costume.
“It’s not really a dance, it’s more a collage of images,” she says. “It’s a dance in my definition. You could say I’ve moved toward images from a dance or performance perspective.” Nevertheless, the same year she worked the piece into a stage performance with dancer Gust Burns called “Bear Dance With Gust.”
For Whiting, one of the most interesting parts of making a dance film is the ability to shoot first and choreograph later in the editing stage with Final Cut Pro.
“With Bear, I discovered this rhythm in the editing,” she says. She initially edited the film to a pop song by the band Holopaw, but later had local composer David Abramson create an original score. “I’m into the timeline, the cut and paste, forming and reforming. Dancers have so much access to technology now, it’s exciting.”
“You can amplify choices as a choreographer through editing,” agrees Dayna. “You’re making choices about time and space, rhythm and speed. I think dance film does spotlight the editor more than other kinds of film.”
With editing, Junkinsmith adds, the choreographer can also switch up the order of certain sections of the dance after the movement itself is finished. “The camera moves, rather than the dancers,” she says.
In her 2007 film Bus Stop, Junkinsmith follows a group of dancers coming together at a street corner to wait for a bus, as they entertain themselves with choreographed movements. The camera switches among the different characters, including close ups of their faces and periodic shots of mundane street life to give context. Black and white Super 8 film stock and shooting by DP Angela Esposito give the remarkable impression that a Capitol Hill street corner resembles Paris.
“You can really play around with time,” Junkinsmith says. “It’s like going to another level, another step. The same ideas are refracted and expanded by the fact that you are seeing them through a lens. I’m interested in exploring the different things that can happen with a lens.”
Longtime local choreographer Peggy Piacenza began by using video as well as animation in her stage shows. “It’s not a new idea to say you’re incorporating some level of film or video in your work,” she says. “If you are someone that is into doing live work and interdisciplinary work, you definitely really love to use film and animation.”
Jessie Smith’s In Memory of Corrosion. Image by Sean Porter.
Piacenza made a Super 8 film called The End is Near as part of Dancers Make Movies in 2002, and last year finished One Day, an improvised short shot by Kasulke and John Dixon on DV, set in Discovery Park.
“It’s another language,” she says. “It conveys meaning in ways that are more accessible. I feel like dance can be a difficult art form for people to find their way into. Moreso than film.”
Perhaps the most accessible of local dance filmmakers for the average movie fan could be Amy O’Neal, who with her company locust makes shorts with a sketch-comedy flair. Her 2005 short Convenience follows the adventures of a comatose man throughout a single day as a team of people makes every move for him, from frying his eggs to playing an Xbox.
In locust’s most recent stage show, “Mockumentary,” 3 screens behind the stage provide a circus-like blitz of stimulation for the eye. One is a live feed on composer and locust co-director Zeke Keeble playing the score, mixed between 3 cameras, while the other two show prerecorded videos. The show opens with a fake documentary about a fake dance company, in which Reggie Watts (frontman for local soul/funk band Maktub) acts as a stereotypical choreographer. “Be more weird,” he exhorts his dancers. “You suck.”
“It brings up what is dance film,” O’Neal says. “You could watch that on Saturday Night Live, even though there are aspects of movement and it has that vibe.”
As the dancer characters develop in the story, they leave rehearsal and morph into zombies. Drawing on classic zombie movie techniques, O’Neal had the dancers perform all their movements backwards, then reversed the footage to make the movements look “wonky.” Watts remains in the story as the zombie master.
O’Neal’s work, for all of its conceptual looseness, falls clearly on the linear and planned side of the choreographic divide.
“We actually did a shot list, we wrote it all down,” O’Neal says. The action later moves to a street in Georgetown, where a roaming gang of female bicycle toughs attack O’Neal’s female protagonist. The gang later have their brains eaten by zombies. “Then the main girl kicks a zombie’s head off,” O’Neal adds.
O’Neal shoots entirely with a Sony HD Handicam and edits in iMovie. She says she has Final Cut Pro, but “I like the simplicity, and I don’t like to have to wait to render, especially when working with movement.” She is in the process of editing “Mocumentary” into a stand-alone short film that will be available on IndieFlix.com.
At the other end of the technical spectrum, 24-year old choreographer Jessie Smith premiered her 16mm short, In Memory of Corrosion, to stunned audiences at the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings festival last fall. Shot by local rising-star DP Sean Porter, it represents perhaps the most meticulously crafted dance film in Seattle since the work of 33 Fainting Spells.
“I prefer to think about making dance film as a filmmaker, not a dancer,” Smith says.
“My whole goal is to get the film to capture the same physical intensity as the live show.”
In Memory of Corrosion takes place in a spot-lit bathtub in the freight elevator of a dilapidated industrial building, and shows Smith in choreographed movements struggling against the confines of her slippery trap. The effect is one of tight, elegant hard work translated to film, with an unexpected sexual subtext as the camera moves over Smith’s wet clothing and tattooed arms and legs.
Smith, who left the Cornish dance program after two years to start her company Dead Bird Movement, says her favorite performance spaces are empty industrial buildings that often require breaking into in the middle of the night with bolt cutters. “They’re not places that audiences can easily get to,” she says. “So film is a tool to capture that.”
But where In Memory of Corrosion was the result of a carefully planned shoot, Smith adds that her normal choreography style is improvisational. Her current work in progress is a short she shot with Kasulke on the fly on Super 8 film over 3 days in Berlin.
“That’s normally how I choreograph, I don’t put a lot of thought into it at the beginning,” she says. “Instead of spending time getting into the details, [the shoot with Kasulke] was reverting back to making split second decisions.”
The shoot began when she and Kasulke realized their travels would intersect over a few days in Berlin last summer. They met right before Kasulke’s departure, and decided they would scout locations when they got there. The only planning Smith could do was to create costumes, made in colors that would show up well on Super 8 film.
“He gave me orange,” she says. “That intimidated me. I thought about this safety orange dance costume and that disgusted me.” Nonetheless, she went to the fabric store and bought orange, worked through a few renditions, and ultimately sewed a “crazy orange tutu with this tight bodice,” she laughs.
Smith will edit the film this winter in part with the resources of 911 Media Arts Center.
Maureen Whiting’s Bear Go Home. Image by Ben Kasulke.
Although 33 Fainting Spells disbanded in 2006 and has ceased presenting the New Dance Cinema festival, Dayna and Gaelen continue to carry the torch separately at Velocity Dance Center, which hosts an annual program of local dance films during its annual Next Fest Northwest. Gaelen curated the 2006 edition; Dayna took it on last December. The films in the 2007 program included Junkinsmith’s Bus Stop, Piacenza’s One Day, and O’Neal’s Convenience. Jessica Jobaris, another choreographer active in film, showed That A Universe My Heart May Unfold, featuring a striking electro-acoustic score by collaborator Luke Allen.
In one of the most disturbing works of the program, the three women of Northwest Dance Syndrome premiered their first film Nocturne, directed by local filmmaker Tyson James Theroux. The film takes on morbid, nightmarish themes in black and white, beginning with a figure burying body bags of living people in the sand of a beach, and ending with a woman trapped in a torture chamber, with only a loose association to traditional dance choreography.
Other young choreographers continue to push the experimental envelope, such as Cassie Wulff, a 24-year old dancer with the Maureen Whiting Dance Company. Her work in progress, Cedar Ridge Hospital, uses toys and action figures in choreographed poses. “It’s not stop motion,” she stresses. “We think of creative ways to show action by taking our hands out of the shot, different special effects.”
Junkinsmith intends to make a dance film in the near future that includes skateboarding, as well as one underwater, while Dayna’s most recent work have been music videos featuring dancers for her band Today!
“The stage is so sterile, like a museum,” Junkinsmith says. “Maybe we should make a film with dancers standing up on the backs of motorcycles, and they go off jumps and crash in big explosions.”
“I bet that would sell,” she adds, thoughtfully.
