Videodance — Technology — Attitude Shift

Abstract

In the late Sixties, Nam June Paik, one of the creators of videoart, expressed his concern that “it is about time we make the distinction between video art and video taped art.” Looking at TV and video dance of the Seventies and early Eighties one feels compelled to agree with Paik, realizing that a distinction must finally be made between video dance and video taped dance. Even when given the opportunity to create a work for video, rather than adapt a proscenium piece, choreographers frequently continue composing dances from a theatrical point of view which are then more or less successfully captured by the media. In other words, instead of creating videodance — a blending of structural and perceptual elements intrinsic to dance and the media — makers unintentionally slip into the genre of video translations of existing works or of videodocumentation. It appears that this state of affairs is chiefly due to two factors. Dancers and choreographers, on the one hand, do not always seek opportunities for hands-on experiences in a television studio or even with portable video equipment (other than shooting a record tape in place of a dance score). Such a practice does not allow for an understanding of the nature of the medium and excludes a creative integration of its expressive potentials. The number of media artists, on the other hand, who are familiar with the nature of dance is small. Independent artists, such as Charles Atlas, Doris Chase, and Jeff Bush or TV directors Fred Barzyk and Rick Hauser, are a minority, and individual dance/performance/media artists, such as Birgit Cullberg, Amy Greenfield, and Elaine Summers are still exceptions.