THE INTENSITY OF DANCE: Body, Movement and Sensation across the Screen (extract)
by Stamatia Portanova, Lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of East London (UK)
"(...) Today, dancing bodies coexist with all sorts of digital machines. Digital videodance
is one of the many ways in which the digital screen is used as an active space of
reciprocal transformation, through a fractal multiplication of dance and its dissolution
into montage. Antonin De Bemels’ videochoreographic films Scrub Solo 1, 2, and 3
(Soloneliness, Disolocation and Soliloquy) and Il s’agit are among the most interesting
examples of this form of audiovisual/choreographic collaboration. In these video
elaborations, the dancing body is re-choreographed through montage and re-modeled
with slow motions and accelerations. Video-dance becomes then a choreography of the
choreography, repeating the energetic tension of dance and its corporeal dissolution
into a schizo-rhythm (a rhythmic continuity infinitesimally cut, broken, dis-connected
and re-connected) distributed across the multiple, simultaneous bodies appearing on
(and in front) of the screen. In other words, the elaboration of rhythm by the biophysical,
anatomical apparatuses of performers and viewers is directly connected to a
technical system of electromagnetic capture, codification, and manipulation. In the
digitalization process, the linearity of both the video and dance rhythm (one step/frame
after another) implodes into a proliferation of microscopic mutations of the
body/image. In this process, the digital recording and editing of Bud Blumenthal’s
dance produces a multiplication of possibilities through the manipulation and
combination of digital data. As an infinitesimal grid of data, the digital granulation and
codification of electromagnetic matter constitutes a limited set of combinatorial
possibilities that is nevertheless able to exercise an amplifying effect on the field
conditions of perception and movement. By determining a multiplication of the
possible combinations of images and sounds, the codified parameters of computer
software can alter the perceptual conditions of the performance. The result is a
transformation of the digital screen into a host of myriads of micro-physical invasive
and unexpected vibrations, and into a porous active surface of perceptual alteration. (...)"