Video Dance: Hybrid Sites and Fluid Bodies.

Abstract

'Video dance', it is argued, embodies a creative investigation of dance and television, and can be identified by cutting edge imagery and innovative filming techniques. Although video dance is an area that has little tradition within dance scholarship, it has inspired a diverse spectrum of reactions that ranges from critics who decry the manipulation of the dancing body by the televisual apparatus, through to practitioners who champion its creative potential. The thesis traces the experimental territory that video dance occupies, pursuing the implications this has for choreographic practices, the spectatorship experience, the performing body and for television as a context for dance. The thesis proposes that video dance can be conceptualised as a 'hybrid site', where a dialectical contest ensues in which the televisual apparatus acts upon the dancing body, and postmodern stage dance practices are relocated to the television context, so that boundaries are challenged and displaced. Dance studies and television theory illustrate how conventions from each discipline are employed and abandoned, in this new interdisciplinary field. In addition to dance and television, video dance traverses other theoretical frameworks and aesthetic sites. This interdisciplinarity highlights the 'fluid' character of the video dance body: video dance shares similarities with the bold commercial images of television advertising and music video; it constructs a technologically enhanced body; and its disruption of aesthetic boundaries offers comparison with the avant-garde. in order to examine the multiplicity of discourses that inscribe the video dance genre, the thesis draws on consumer theory, writings on 'mechanical' and 'new digital' technologies, and Kristeva's concept of 'revolution in poetic language' as frameworks of analysis. The validity of this inter-discursive methodology is that it reveals the potential of video dance to traverse and disrupt symbolic boundaries, and explains the impact this has on dance theory and practice