Experimental cinema puts movement in focus

Think of dance on film and what comes to mind is a single camera planted squarely in front of a stage full of ballet dancers. But dance and film or video can interact in far more interesting ways than that. Ohio State University dance professor Victoria Uris has put together two nights of examples of ways in which dance and film can feed each other.

The work is drawn from the past few years of Dance on Camera Festivals at Lincoln Center in New York.
Last night's selection featured two short, intense experimental works and a longer documentary. The provocative Spanish Astragalus uses quick cuts and unusual film angles to heighten the effect of two female dancers moving in their own tightly contained spaces.

To the beat of pounding, percussive music, one struggles in deep shadow, occasionally passing into a dim ring of light, while the other fights in tight circles through clouds of golden dust. Camera work calls into question the relationship between the two and focuses attention on small segments of their bodies with disturbing precision.
The dreamy Australian Nascent, set to deliberately staticky electronic music, makes use of computer graphics to morph the elements of human movement into shapes that tinker with perception.

What first is clearly a human form (or five or six) is transformed into a moving spine or an insectlike form, with limbs and torsos occasionally emerging and calling out their identities.
Haunting Douglas, a wrenching biography of Douglas Wright, a dancer and choreographer from New Zealand, is the most conventional of the three works, although in its own subtle way it plays with the interaction between dance and film.
Haunting shifts between scenes of a clearly uncomfortable Wright being interviewed by filmmaker Leanne Pooley and fragments of filmed dances performed or choreographed by Wright.

At one point, a frustrated Wright accuses the filmmaker of demanding a "metaphorical pound of flesh" from him in exchange for providing him with an opportunity to give his works wider exposure. The interviewed Wright is filmed in extremely tight close-ups, in which part of a cheek or a lip fills the screen, and his body seems out of control.
The camera steps back to a more respectful distance for the dance scenes, allowing the dancers' bodies to exist in relationship to each other.

Although the documentary isn't designed to comment on the integration of film and dance, conventionally filmed one-camera shots from the '80s contrast clearly with some of Wright's more recent pieces, where the camera glides through an outdoor setting or jumps around the room, playing the role of partner to the dancers.