Dance Film
/Video collaboration is still a new realm of exploration for
contemporary dancers and filmmakers in Russia. However, for
almost a half a century, dancers have collaborated with filmmakers
to create fabulous narrative stage adaptations of the world-famous
Russian ballets.
One of the
unique ones is Alexander Belinsky’s “Anyuta”
based on Anton Chekhov’s story “Anna na shee”
(“Anna on the neck”) with Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir
Vassiliev. This ballet was created specifically for the camera.
In his book “The Old Tango”, Belinsky ruminates on
the notion of “televisionnost” (1),
i.e. different ways to expand the choreography beyond the stage
such as changing action locations, having the same dancer play
different characters, etc., he writes, “Televisionnost’
is something that is not possible in the Ballet theatre; it
is supposed to be figured out in the script, it gives dynamism
to the spectacle and compensates for real time on screen. “Anyuta”
was the first film-ballet that demonstrates "televisionnost'
consciously rather than intuitively." (2)
Belinsky introduces the term “montage choreography”
and points out that Vladimir Vassiliev, the choreographer of
“Anyuta”, constructed all mass scenes in the editing
room. The success of “Anyuta” was so remarkable that
the choreography found its re-incarnation on the stages of the
Bolshoi and Naples Theatres.
The reason
that film-ballets have been the major form of dance and film
collaboration is that during most years of the Soviet era (excluding
the first two decades), ballet was almost the only form of artistic
expression in terms of body movement. In 1924, the Mossoviet
Section of the Moscow Department of People’s Education
released a decree that banned all private ballet and choreography
schools, studios and classes, except for the “specific
classes in the art of ballet” of the Bolshoi Theatre and
a few other ballet studios. (3) Further decrees
of this nature prohibited even such dances as the fox-trot.
At the same time, most of the Soviet film production happened
under the umbrella of the large film studios and on 35mm, so
the experimental film tradition has never fully developed and
therefore, inlike in the US, for example, the space for the
short dance film experiments has never been created.
Despite
the dominance of film-ballets, there are few examples of dance
film collaborations that date back from the earlier days of
“wild” modern dance in Russia (1900s-1930s). This
period of artistic movement in Russia still remains unknown
to most audiences around the world. In the catalog of the exhibition
“The Art of Movement in Moscow during the 1920s” that
took place at the Bakhrushin Museum in 2000, an Italian dance
historian, Nicoletta Misler refers to the dance film pantomimes
"Cinedance" (1926) and "Cinedetective" (1927)
by Alexander Rumnev (1899-1965), an actor and dancer who “conceived
dance” as a free expression of the body. Unfortunately,
a few years in Gulag caused Rumnev abandon his experimentations
and devote renewed energy to his acting career. Soon after appearing
in “Ivan the Terrible” by Sergei Eisenstein (1944)
and "Zhirmunka" by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1941), Rumnev
settled as a professor at VGIK where he taught the art of movement
for actors.
In his turn,
Alexei Sidorov (1891-1978), photographer and art historian,
author of the book “Modern Dance” published in 1922,
used the camera to record all his movement experiments in his
studio (named “Choreographical Laboratory”) and even
gave a lecture on Dance and the Cinema at the meeting of the
Cine-Commission in 1924. (4)
Films from
the 1920s have never been seen or found, and I secretly hope
that they are still hiding behind dusty cans of celluloid waiting
to be discovered by a magician archivist. There are documentary
and feature films are to be made about the Russian Art of Movement
and different media collaborations. While unfolding this history,
I encourage us to move forward, as I still share my dream with
Maya Deren, the first conceptualizer of the dance film genre
who wrote, "it is my earnest hope that film-dance will
be rapidly developed and that, in the interest of such a development,
a new era of collaboration between dancers and film-makers will
open up – one in which both would pool their creative energies
and talents towards an integrated art expression."(5)
The mass
availability of camcorders has opened new alleyways for every
dancer and film / video maker in our country to experiment with
and explore this hybrid genre in the creation of a new, cinematic
space for dance to exist within. There are currently 18 dance
film festivals taking place around the world and they are all
waiting to hear from us…
____________________________________
1
A prototype of ‘televisionnost’ had been described
three decades earlier by Maya Deren, an American dancer, filmmaker,
and ethnographer, who was the first to conceptualize the genre
of dance film in her essay “Choreography of the Camera”
in 1945. She wrote, in the film dance [dance film] –
a dance is so related to camera and cutting that it cannot be
“performed” as a unit anywhere but in this particular
film.
Maya Deren, “Choreography for the Camera”, Dance Magazine,
1945
2 Alexander Belinsky,
“The Old Tango”, Moscow, 1988, p.150.
3 Nicoletta Missler,
“A Choreographical Laboratory”, Experiment,
a journal of Russia Culture, Vol.2, 1996, p.178
4 Ibid, p.174
5 Maya Deren, “Choreography
for the Camera”, Dance Magazine, 1945
For questions
and comments, please contact Alla Kovgan
at akovgan@kinodance.com
© Kinodance–Russia, 2004
akovgan@kinodance.com
