Dancehouse’s biennial festival of dance on screen returned from 13-31 from July with 37 screendance works screened at Dancehouse and digitally on demand. The festival also included live and online talks, and four workshops for screendance makers.

The 2023 Dance (Lens) Festival was curated by three screendance artists and curators: Siobhan Murphy (Vic), Feras Shaheen (NSW) and international renowned guest curator Gitta Wigro (UK). The curators program the festival from a National callout, including the ‘Official Selection’ of recent local Australian screendance works.

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IN FOCUS: in conversation with Claire Marshall

Claire’s films have screened around the globe and won international awards, as well as being officially selected for both the inaugural (202) and current Dance (Lens) (2023) Festivals at Dancehouse.

Claire’s research renounces traditional methods of filmmaking where storyboarding and shot-listing compose the story before production begins, instead placing cinematic elements including location, cinematography, and editing at the centre of the creative process to subvert expectations in dance film.

Siobhan Murphy and Feras Shaheen are co-curators of Dance (Lens) 2023.

This conversation is part of Dance Research Australia’s ongoing seminar series, in association with Dancehouse as part of Dance (Lens).

Out of Line: Feras Shaheen in conversation with Mr Kriss

Feras Shaheen sits down with Mr Kriss to talk about all things screen dance.

Material Moves: Siobhan Murphy in conversation with Melanie Kloetzel

Melanie Kloetzel joins Siobhan Murphy in a conversation about site, screen, materiality and the screendances curated in material moves. Melanie is a settler artist, scholar and educator located in Treaty 7 Territory on Turtle Island (Canada). Siobhan is a settler of Celtic descent currently living at Geboor (Macedon) on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people. She makes screendance and publishes writing in the field of dance studies.

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Sound into Sight: Gitta Wigro in conversation with Graeme Miller

Most people perceive films through two senses: sight and sound. Vision gets first billing: we say we ‘watch’ films, and our experience of their sound is rarely articulated. And yet, sound is the thing that actually touches us: disturbances in the distribution of air molecules become pressure waves inside the ear. For screendance it’s often particularly important to convey the physicality of what’s happening on screen. Sound can transmit the experience of weight, touch, texture, space, and bring depth to the two-dimensional image on screen.

Film distinguishes between the score—the music composed for the film—and sound design, which is every piece of audio in a film, including dialogue, sound effects, ambiance, score, and soundtrack, combined to create the film’s soundscape. These five films invite you to listen closely to their soundscapes: observe what you hear.

Conversation with Graeme Miller:

Sound is often given second billing in the conception and production of screendance, yet is such a crucial tool at the filmmakers disposal.

To accompany the Sound into Sight film programme, curator Gitta Wigro invited artist Graeme Miller to talk about the power of sound to build worlds. Graeme is an artist, composer and performance-maker, and in this conversation he draws on and shares his experiences and his curiosity as a filmmaker and sound designer.

Graeme talks about listening as a situation; and as something that is informed by culture: we don’t listen innocently. We are always manipulated – and at the same time we listen for authenticity, something we can still recognise as ‘real’, even though it is manufactured. Sound conveys space, weight, texture, proximity. It also conveys culture, meaning, and interpretation. It implies the world.

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Reel Dance / Dance (Lens): Curatorial Essay By Erin Brannigan, Siobhan Murphy and Feras Shaheen

This program of dancefilms represents, on the one hand, a certain and specific period of work in Sydney 2000-2008, and on the other, an expansive present and future for the art form.

In Sydney in the 1990s and 2000s, as elsewhere in Australia and the rest of the world, a new genre of short films called dancescreen was being commissioned by broadcasters, supported by arts funding bodies, self-funded by choreographers and directors, and filled bespoke events and festivals that formed an international touring platform for the work. It was important in raising the visibility of dance and dance artists but was also understood as a new intermedial art form that encompassed documentaries and referenced video art as it had emerged since mid-twentieth-century, as well as other screen forms such as music video. Academic books and articles were written, a journal set-up, media reviewed festivals such as ReelDance, and other national programs such as the exhibition 24 Frames Per Second at Carriageworks in 2015 kept the art form visible.

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