A Study in Choreography for CameraDance for camera
Dance that only exists on film
A dancer starts a move in a forest and lands it in a living room. Three minutes long, it's routinely taught as a founding work of screendance.
Screendance
Dance made for the camera, where the cut and the frame are part of the choreography.
A filmed performance records a dance that exists without the camera. Screendance makes a dance that could only exist on screen: a step that starts in one place and ends in another, a body slowed, repeated or cut to a new rhythm.
Maya Deren's three-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera, made with the dancer Talley Beatty in 1945, is usually named as the first. The field now has its own festivals, journals and courses, and goes by several names: dance film, dance for camera, videodance.
Films to start with
In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
A Study in Choreography for Camera
The dancer Talley Beatty begins a movement in a forest and finishes it in a living room. A few minutes long, and one of the first films to treat dance as something made for the camera.
Ritual in Transfigured Time
A party turns into a dance, and a dance into a pursuit. Deren uses freeze frames and slow motion to make social ritual look like choreography.
Where it led
Lines from these films into work you may already know.
A Study in Choreography for CameraNearby
Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.