Tanz und WahnSinn / Dance and ChoreoMania

 

table of contents

Abstracts and additional visual and audiovisual material on this website:

IV. Performance and Choreomania


Neil Ellis Orts
The Camera Tells No Lies – Except When It Does

[english]

Neil Ellis Orts


The Camera Tells No Lies—Except When It Does

Dance With Camera, a multimedia exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston featuring a formidable selection of film projections, videos and images made by filmmakers, video artists, visual artists and photographers (and not necessarily by choreographers and dancers) over the past 60 years, raises complex questions about artifice and reality. Differing behaviors classified as “dance” ultimately lead us to questions of definition and to a recognition of the impact of camera and editing on the perception of movement. In the context of the exhibition, such perception is further complicated by provocative juxtapositions of works that suggest representations of “exercises” (Bruce Nauman’s Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square), stillness (Tacita Dean’s Merce (Manchester), shot only a short time before Merce Cunningham’s death in 2010), or madness (Joachim Koester’s Tarantism). This review essay examines the reconceptions and distortions of the real, and the transformational effects of the camera on what is believed to be dance (and not-dance), while proposing that the manipulation of the medium forces the viewer to become conscious of their own bodies and ways of looking at the invisible visible or, as Tacita Dean suggests, the silence.

 

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Herausgeberin und Herausgeber / editors
Zu den Autorinnen und Autoren /authors
Bildnachweis / list of illustrations

 

(c) 2011 Johannes Birringer & Josephine Fenger, editors

Leipzig: Henschel Verlag, 2011.paperback,€ 19.90, ISBN-10: 3894877103

This book project is supported by

Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung (GTF)

For the publisher's announcement, click here