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Anarchival Outbursts: Dance and the Practices of Post-Digital Cinema

SSHRC Insight Grant, 2014-2019

Cinema today is on the move. This project traces dance's transversal movements between stage and screen media ecologies in a post-digital expanded cinema, exploring both mainstream and experimental works. How does a newly mobile "cinema" today move beyond public and home theatres to find innovative ways of staging audiovisual images? This project defines new articulations of body and technology in cinema in the wake of the digital turn, as live dance performance engages increasingly with audio-visual media technologies. If the "digital turn" has generally referred to the mainstreaming of digital effects, and the revolution afforded by digital cameras and non-linear postproduction technology, we must also consider how a new mobility of cinema has emerged through new platforms of presentation and dissemination outside of the box of the traditional theatre. This mobility is found in the material practices of post-digital cinema (through experimentation with new forms of installation and screening), in the content and form of cinema works themselves, and has produced new experiences of cinematic spectatorship and embodiment.

One of the best resources we have for understanding the effects of this new mobility is to think contemporary cinema through its relation to another art of movement: dance. "Anarchival Outbursts: Dance and the Practices of Post-Digital Cinema" explores key examples of dance in post-digital cinema to ask: what are the productive tensions and anxieties around bodily experience in the age of post-digital cinema that can only be addressed by recourse to dance? Across cinema, dance is newly popular at many levels of production. Screendance has become its own genre, complete with an established festival circuit; this emerging genre experiments with the specificity of how bodies move across cinema. Many feature filmmakers have turned their attention to dance films (eg. Phillippe Grandieux's Guy Maddin, Wim Wenders, Mike Figgis and Jaco Van Dormeal), exploring the potential for a new "expanded cinema" relative to what Chantal Pontbriand has termed "expanded dance". Other narrative filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and David Lynch have explicitly used dance as a means to explore the transition to digital cinema. Screendance has also served as a critical site of exploration of new modes of digital embodiment, through the synthespians of motion capture and digital composition (as with the experimental works of Thierry de Mey, Nicolas Briand, Philippe Bayleucq and others). At the same time, contemporary dancemakers integrate cinematic elements into their performances.

Anarchival Outbursts assesses how the effects of how intermedial performance changes the conditions under which we answer such fundamental questions as the liveliness of the cinematic image, and the effects of cinema's transformations of live bodies. As dance filmmakers experiment with the possibilities for new creation (not simply recording, reproducing or representing) opened up by screen dance, their works stage the complicated question of how we live our own moving images. What new avenues of expanded perception and action do the affects and sensations engendered by these images make possible? What does dance do in post-digital cinema?

Cinema Out of the Box brings mobile media out of the theatre and into the environment. With the help of the 看片视频 Sustainability Projects fund and the Moving Image Research Laboratory, we have developed a fully mobile and self-sustaining film projection system - moved and powered by bicycle - that is capable of presenting cinema in just about any geography, temporality, or climate. Our mandate is to explore the urban ecologies of Montr茅al with a variety of moving image experiments, including 16mm, Super8, and digital screenings. We are interested in several animating questions: How much energy does it take to power projections? How do built environments interact with media ecologies? What kinds of interpretive links do we draw between film worlds and those the environments immediate to the screening? How can environmental media help us re-think the use of artificial spaces as a part of a general ecological practice?

for regular screenings and special events.

The Moving Image Research Laboratory ()

CFI-funded infrastructural laboratory for the investigation of relations between developments in moving image technologies and understandings of the moving body. Investigators: Michael Cowan (German), Alanna Thain (English), Thomas Lamarre (East Asian Studies/AHCS).

Other Projects

• Editor,
• Norman McLaren: 3 Films.听A book length study of three of McLaren's key films and the increasing importance of mid century animation to the wider field of cinema studies after the digital turn.
• Moving in an Experimental Night. A book project on contemporary intersections of dance performance and animation, including work by William Kentridge, David Lynch, Vera Chytilova, Norman McLaren, 4-D Art, Tino Seghal, Crystal Pite, and others.
• Project on 听