Hiding in Plain Site: Screendance Histories and the Expanded Imagination

A lecture by
Douglas Rosenberg
Professor and Chair of the Art Department,
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussants
Usha Iyer, Stanford University
Sima Belmar, University of California, Berkeley

In a seminal essay “Video Space: A Site For Choreography,” first published in LEONARDO in 2000, Douglas Rosenberg notes, “Video space as a site for choreography is a malleable space for the exploration of dance as subject, object and metaphor, a meeting place for ideas about time, space and movement.” Dance has been inextricably linked to the sequential image since the earliest days of photography. Expanding the scope of thinking to analog or “hand drawn” technologies offers an even more extended notion of screendance and allows us to theorize a trajectory that wanders into the territories of the visual arts, theater, storytelling and beyond. Screendance is perhaps the most invasive of all arts species; it has been hiding in plain site since well before there was a critical mass of interest in the form, even before it was named as such. This talk visualizes a screendance history, theory and practice that is transgressive and ever-present, even if hovering slightly out of the frame.

Presenter Bio
Douglas Rosenberg is Professor and Chair of the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an artist, theorist, and the author of Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, as well as a founding editor of The International Journal of Screendance. His work in video, installation, and performance has been exhibited internationally for over 30 years and has been supported by numerous grants and awards including, the NEA, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Soros Foundation, the MAP Fund in New York, and the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video. Recent venues for screenings of his work include Limerick City Gallery of Art, Scotland, Lincoln Center, New York, and le Festival Ciné-Corps de Paris in 2018.

Discussant Bios
Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender studies, with a specific focus on dance, stardom, and gender in Indian cinema. Her current book project, “The Dancing Heroine: Choreographing Gender in Popular Hindi Cinema,” examines the role of dance in the construction of female stardom from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Sima Belmar holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where she is a Lecturer. Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Performance Matters, and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. She writes the "In Practice" column for In Dance, a publication of Dancers' Group, is a member of the Isadora Duncan Awards committee, and is a Low-Res Writer's Lab fellow at the National Center for Choreography in Akron, Ohio.

The Stanford Colloquium on Dance Studies is sponsored by the Mellon “Dance Studies in/and the Humanities” initiative and is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Co-sponsors include the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, Stanford Humanities Center, the Department of Theater & Performance Studies, and the Film & Media Studies Program, Department of Art History.