The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies edited by Douglas Rosenberg. 2016. New York: Oxford UP

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The International Journal of Screendance 8 (2017).
The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies edited by
Douglas Rosenberg. 2016. New York: Oxford UP. 816 pp, 107
b&w screen stills. $150 hardcover. ISBN: 9780199981601.
Katja Vaghi, Independent scholar
Keywords: screendance studies, history, theory, practice
The publication of The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies edited by Douglas
Rosenberg, a pioneering figure in the field, can be seen as the culmination of the ever-
increasing visibility gained by dance on screen throughout the years. An established
art form, its theoretical framework though sitting at “the intersections of performance,
media, film and dance studies”1 has been slower to develop, which is the reason for
Rosenberg’s enterprise. Taking as a point of departure Yvonne Rainer’s words about
“the voice of the artist simultaneously framing her practice in theoretical and historical
spaces,”2 Rosenberg invited 36 contributions by international curators, researchers,
and makers, all involved first hand in the creation and production of dance films, to
debate ontological and epistemological issues about screendance. The book’s
resulting kaleidoscopic views are grouped for convenience into three categories:
history, theory, and practice, which Rosenberg acknowledges as “porous and
flexible,”3 showcasing the methodological richness and diversity of the field. Seen as a
stepping-stone rather than the definitive guide to screendance, the book initiates an
interdisciplinary dialog on dance and screen technologies to determine where the
field is coming from, what it is doing and where it is going.
The chapters in the historical section focus on several aspects: from the development
of screendance in a specific country to the relation with preceding media, such as
photography and film, to synchronic studies of one particular point in time. Instead of
discussing mainstream films, the contributions focus on more experimental works
associated with silent films and visual art. These are works that in the words of Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy “create rather than capture images.”4 Of particular interest is Ana
Olenina’s contribution on filmmakers Lev Kuleshov’s and Dziga Vertov’s studies of
movement in the choreological laboratory at the Russian Academy of Artistic Science
during the 1920s. Non-Western traditions are also included: Pallabi Chakravorty, for
example, elegantly writes on the homogenization process occurring in Indian music
video industry, and music and dance reality shows under the influence of the
Bollywood industry, explaining the different connotation that desire and
choreography have in the country. Conversely, Nicolás Salazar Sutil and Sebastián

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Melo explore the origins of the Western scopic tradition in the thinking of Zeno of Elea
and Aristotle, and the implications for ways of thinking about and subsequently
capturing movement. They further discuss how Henri Bergson’s thinking, the
development of Italian Photodynamism, and Marcel Duchamp’s works challenge the
scientific chronophotographic approach of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules
Marey.
Interestingly, in the middle section on theory, most chapters concentrate on single
elements of screendance rather than on general methodological questions. These
approaches consider the moving body as a site for resistance questioning
assumptions about gender, different corporealities, politics, and postcolonial
identities. For example, Frances Hubbard argues that screendance works are “practices
of freedom.”5 Other authors address questions of kinaesthetic empathy and of the
influence of sound in reception. All contributors point to screendance as creating a
new understanding of dance, of the body, and of the moving image. Of particular
interest in this section are Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen’s neuroscientific study of
Maya Deren’s At Land, which determines that the film elicits shared viewing
experiences similar to mainstream storytelling, and Susana Temperley’s reintroduction
of aesthetics as a critical term, which allows her to discuss screendance as a practice
that creates bodily experiences of aesthetic (dis)pleasure bypassing Romantic or
Formalist fixation on the object’s aesthetic form.
The third section, on practices, is the most heterogeneous. Some contributions
concentrate on the work of influential artists, while others discuss aspects of
filmmaking such as editing as a choreographic tool, the long-overlooked importance
of preproduction scripts, or the different types of mixed reality that a performance
incorporating screens can create. The section also encompasses questions related to
the representation of racial and social issues in popular dance on YouTube and in
mainstream films. Underlying all chapters is the desire to challenge the apparent
transparency of filmmaking technologies and representations to better understand
contemporary dance and screendance. Ann Cooper Albright’s suggestion that Loïe
Fuller’s work and reception foreshadows current debates about representation and
the body points to the fact that dance and technologies have always been closer than
usually considered. Sita Popat shifts the site for future dance works to mixed realities
created in live performance as new computing interfaces change our ways of
perceiving and engaging with physical reality. Naomi Jackson underlines the subtle
power that social media such as YouTube can have in generating social justice and in
the future of screendance.
The handbook is definitively a great resource for students as well as seasoned
researchers looking for a new approach to screendance. This compendium contains
many inspiring contributions, from experimental Soviet film in the 1920s to Brazilian
video dance history to the challenge of racial norms in Shirley Temple and Bill

REVIEW: OXFORD HANDBOOK OF SCREENDANCE STUDIES 151
Robinson’s film duets of the 1930s and the (mis)representation of black female
sexuality in winnin’ dance-videos. The expansiveness of Rosenberg’s volume is
possibly also its limitation. In its effort to be comprehensive, the book loses cohesion.
The hybridity of works listed and theories used gives a well-rounded but merely
sketched impression of the screendance field. A necklace of differently shaped pearls,
its heterogeneous format allows only for an imbalanced view of specific topics. The
book raises awareness of the omnipresence of new technologies and how under-
analyzed these are. The wealth of examples stimulates discussion of new modes of
understanding our being-in-the-world as viewers and dancers “beyond linguistically-
centered performance conventions and representation,”6 bringing into question what
we understand as dance and screendance. The book might not yet create a new mode
of (collective) thinking as it promises, but it succeeds in advocating for screendance as
a site of resistance to gender, racial, and social normalization in contemporary society.
Biography
Katja Vaghi, Ph.D., is a Swiss dance maker, movement educator, and researcher. She is
specialized in intermediality and the neo-baroque (University of Roehampton) and has
worked associated Lecturer at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance
and at the University of Northampton. Her performances encompass the use of
traditional and non-traditional spaces. She is recipient of the Selma Jeanne Cohen
award (2014) and makes regular contributions to the Bachtrack online magazine.
Email: kvaghi@gmail.com
Notes
1 Douglas Rosenberg, Oxford Handbook, 1.
2 Quoted in idem, 2.
3 Idem, 1.
4 Quoted in idem, 6.
5 Frances Hubbard, “Privileging Embodied Experience,” 384.
6 Susan Kozel quoted in Andrea Davidson, “Extending the Discourse of Screendance,”
412. Here, Kozel is referencing French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray.

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References
Davidson, Andrea. “Extending the Discourse of Screendance: Dance and New Media.”
In Douglas Rosenberg (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016. 389-420.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199981601.001.0001
Hubbard, Frances. “Privileging Embodied Experience in Feminist Screendance.” In
Douglas Rosenberg (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016. 369–388.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199981601.001.0001
Rosenberg, Douglas (Ed.) “Introduction.” The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1–20.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199981601.001.0001