| Session 3 | Virtual Spectatorship |
| Jayne King | Women Work It On Out: An Intergenerational Encounter Through Dance |
| In “Dance Narratives and Fantasies” Agnes Mc Robbie writes that for generations of women dance has represented “an arena for self expression…away from the difficulties of everyday life…. a symbolic escape route from the more normative expectations of young women …” “I dance because it ...makes me feel free,” writes Ms Mae, one of twenty seniors who participated in Work It On Out, a community dance project which brought elders together with dance majors at Northwest Vista College. Sharing dances and stories about dance, we would form a unique intergenerational community to celebrate a woman’s ongoing love affair with dance. Though dance is not something that old and young typically share, the exuberance in the simple acts of moving together created instant rapport. With Aretha crooning “freedom…” in the background, looking good and shaking our shoulders and hips was a “fem-positive “message of grace, dignity and strength over circumstance, signified by the freedom of the body. | |
| Harmony Bench | Constructing Alternate Spectatorships: Duration and Perception in Media-Choreographies of Scale |
| This paper addresses two media-choreographies that are scaled to opposite durational and proportional extremes: David Michalek’s Slow Dancing, which elongates five-second choreographies into ten minute films projected onto screens as much as 50 feet tall, and Simon Ellis and David Corbet’s Microflicks, which are two-second video dances for iPods and other small screens. I argue that both Slow Dancing and Microflicks foreground the experience of visual perception in their explorations of size and duration. In line with some postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial film techniques that interrupt visuality with blurred or asynchronous imagery, Microflicks and Slow Dancing articulate alternate modes of perception and attention through which they bring viewers into the dance. | |
| Ying-Chu Chen | You Dance, I Watch, We Share—on YouTube.com: The Impact of Online Dance Videos on the Advocacy of Dance |
| YouTube.com, a website established in 2005, is one of the most popular Internet video-sharing sites. YouTube users are either posters or viewers, or both, who upload and/or watch videos on this site. Serving as a free resource in various countries and languages, YouTube contains numerous dance videos, many widely unknown, commercially unavailable, or regionally restricted. In addition to the volume of video postings and the convenience of instant viewing, YouTube also provides space under the viewing window of each video for commentary. With its considerable capacity to host videos and facilitate discussions, YouTube serves as a great resource for gaining exposure to and receiving information about dance. However, impressive features may in fact be flawed. For example, dance videos posted on the site may contain false demonstrations and comments, followed by misleading messages. This paper presentation studies the roles that YouTube and its videos play with regard to dance advocacy. | |
| Jayne King directs the dance program at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was Artistic Director of Janlyn Dance Company, creating over twenty original works for the ensemble from 1997-2004. Since moving to San Antonio Jayne has especially enjoyed making dances with the San Antonio Modern Dancers Co-Lab, which she co-founded in 2005. She has a Masters degree from Mills College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin. Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. Other recent choreographic projects include Restraint System, a site specific work for the Blue Star Contemporary Arts Gallery in San Antonio and Floodgate, a dance film shot on location at the Flood Control Tunnel Outlet Building on the San Antonio River. In Spring 08 Jayne directed Performing History: Discovering Reciprocal Influences in Contemporary Dance(Mexico and the United States), a reconstruction of Anna Sokolow’s Frida and international exchange with the Escuela Nacional de Danza in Mexico City, sponsored by the American Masterpieces program of the NEA. | |
| Harmony Bench is a doctoral candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA where she is currently finishing her dissertation on dance, interactivity, and the Internet. She is particularly interested in how new media demand a rigorous re-consideration of choreography as a concept and how, as images, dancing bodies articulate new dance practices on/for the screen. As both dancer and scholar, Harmony divides her time between performing, writing, and teaching. She also holds degrees in Performance Studies from NYU and in Women’s Studies and Ballet from the University of Utah. | |
| Ying-Chu Chen recently received her doctorate in dance from Temple University. She also holds M.A. degrees in dance and media studies. She has been researching the worldwide development of ballet, particularly in Asia. Her dissertation explores the survival of the Taiwanese ballet within local, as well as global, cultural contexts. While continuing her research as a ballet historian, she is expanding her scholarly interests to include technology’s influence on the creative process and the viewing experience of dance. Ying-Chu is currently a freelance dance author and writes grant proposals for performing arts organizations. | |
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