PillowVoices composer and audio engineer Ellis Rovin ruminates on some of the ways that dance has been seen on film, drawing upon a PillowTalk by David Gere and considering examples from Fred Astaire to Merce Cunningham.
PillowVoices composer and audio engineer Ellis Rovin ruminates on some of the ways that dance has been seen on film, drawing upon a PillowTalk by David Gere and considering examples from Fred Astaire to Merce Cunningham.
Special thanks to New England Public Media, for their support of this episode of PillowVoices.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce PillowVoices composer and audio engineer, Ellis Rovin. He’ll be our guide as we consider some examples of dance on film and video throughout the twentieth century.
ELLIS ROVIN: When I was asked to host this episode of the podcast, I began looking for the stories which piqued my interest. I was mainly focusing on my primary role at The Pillow, Composing, when I was sent one particular lecture that I found really poignant. In July of 1998, scholar David Gere had hosted a lecture entitled “Pillow On Screen: Dance in the Twentieth Century”, where he opened with a statement I found both unusual for lecture at a dance festival, and extremely prescient for 1998
DAVID GERE: The reason for the topic of this particular talk is that along with all the live performance that's happening on the stage is right here at the Pillow. I think that you're all aware that most people don't come to see dance live, it's actually the unusual person who chooses to buy a ticket and come see a performance. Most people if they encounter dancing, either do it themselves at home or at a club, or potentially they see it on television.
ELLIS ROVIN: As a video and mixed media artist myself, this got me thinking, even in our contemporary moment, where fine arts take up a smaller slice of broadcast media programming than ever before, and nightclubs are just reopening after a pandemic-induced hiatus, dance and movement is as strong in the zeitgeist of America’s youth as it has ever been. This being said, almost all of the dance in question being consumed is not in person, but rather through video. I’ve worked with the Pillow Archives for long enough to know that almost every facet of contemporary movement can be traced back through decades, or sometimes centuries, of artistic practice. And so, I began my journey of answering the question; ‘how did we get here?’
As an artist, one thing that has always fascinated me in regards to both dance and motion picture, is the extrapolation of the idea of time. While time is a factor in many art forms, from the length of a play to the rhythm of a musical figure, both dance and motion picture explore both time AND space simultaneously, the conflation of which produces ideas such as velocity, balance, mass, and inertia, all themes which both dance and motion picture are especially primed to explore.
Dance and film have been intertwined since almost the earliest days of cinema. Early adopters of the medium Auguste and Louis Lumiere published their first dance film in 1897, a performance of Louis Fuller's serpentine dance, which had made the American Fuller, one of the most celebrated dancers in Europe during the early 20th century. Fuller's serpentine dance involves the dancer choreographer extending her arms with bamboo rods sewn into her sleeves, and attaching layers of silk and gauze to her newly extended limbs. Fuller, an early pioneer in stage design, used intricate lighting setups to project different colors around her body, having the colors mix and the transparency of the textiles she was adorned with. The film was such a success, various recreations were made with dancers from around the world. With the prominent US version being done by the Edison manufacturing company, starring early Broadway star Annabelle more. As a side note, the Edison manufacturing company which in 1911 changed its name to Thomas A Edison ink would go on to release the film of pillow founder Ted Sean's groundbreaking work “Dance of the Ages,” which still exists in the pillow archives today. By the 1920s, the irreverence of the Dada movement had opened the door for what would later be deemed multi or mixed media. In 1924, “Relache,” a ballet by Francis Picabia and Eric Satie, a short film was played both before the production and during intermission. The film featured the composer and director of the ballet, as well as other contemporary artists in Paris at the time.
The next major advancement and dance on film happened in the United States with Fred Astaire. Astaire, an established performer both on both Broadway and the London theater circuit began to do screen tests for RKO, essentially applying to be a performer and their new radio picture technology. Though the exact details are contested, almost all accounts state that these screen tests went poorly. Astaire himself or called the producers notes as ‘can't act slightly bald, also dances.’ Nonetheless, Astaire soon after did his first motion picture with MGM 1930 threes “Dancing Lady” were the ‘also dances’ part of his act was recognized by audiences nationwide. A contemporaneous review of the film by the New York Times lists Astaire and a long list of actors labeled ‘also featuring’ but takes the time to note, “the dancing of Fred Astaire and Miss Crawford is most graceful and charming. The photographic effects of their scenes are an impressive achievement.”
They were indeed an impressive achievement. Whereas most dancing in musical films was shot as a spectacle, using aggressive cuts and zooms to enhance the audience's excitement. A stair used his star power to demand a camera follow him and his partner slowly on a dolly, with as few cuts as possible, smoothly gliding along the ballroom floor with the same effortless grace he and his partner were exhibiting. This allowed the dancers to be consistently in frame, making their subtle expressions and movement styles more integral to the plot of the film. Astaire’s camera techniques were played with and tweaked as the 20th century progressed. One of the most famous examples of dance on screen. Dawn Cornelius's original Soul Train, which ran from 1971 to 1993. Keeps the dancers’ bodies fully in frame following their path as they move down the line, much like a stairs Dolly. Conversely, Soul trains directors and editors used cuts regularly to navigate around the set and focus on different dancers, as well as imitate the rapid movement of time one experiences while dancing at a club. Another big development in filming dance came with the 1970s WNET program dance in America, which, as Gere explains, took a different view on capturing dance.
DAVID GERE: Because if anything, dance in two-dimensional medium is best known to us through those those Hollywood musicals, but it wasn't so long after that a new kind of genre of dancing on screen came about and it was in the 1970s, in the form of “Dance in America.” It's an amazing series sponsored by great performances, it started in 1976. And this is a team, which over the course of about 15 years made an enormous number of televised adaptations of theatrical performances of dance. And that was the special thing about the Dance in America program and always has been, this is not dancing that's made for the camera. Rather, it's the camera coming into the theatrical space, and helping people who aren't buying a ticket to actually see something like what some ticket buyer is, is seeing on site. The classic approach, if you can imagine this, cuz we're gonna talk a little bit about camera work today and how that influences the way we see. The classic approach was a multi camera approach. We see what we believe is a live performance. This was not actually true of “Sossle,” but most most of the others. We see what looks like a live performance, we hear an audience we sent their energy, we hear applause at appropriate moments. The camera often is at a wide angle so that we can see the whole stage, the sense being you're sitting in your seat, there it is present to you. There are at least two other camera angles that are very important in that scheme. One is about you know, a medium shot, often shot from a balcony at the side, where you can get say half the stage or follow a group of dancers across the stage, seeing their entrances and following them onto the stage. But another very important element of this in the syntax of Dance in America shooting was to come in for the close up. So even though often you saw the whole stage or you saw the whole body of the dancer, there were moments when you came in on the face or on the hand or on the feet, tracing parts of the body. And the best directors it was thought were the ones who could go to the right part of the body at the right time and not make you feel frustrated that you were missing you know the hand that was being cut off the the side of the frame.
ELLIS ROVIN: While Dance in America did immense work and using the camera to deliver dance and music to households across the country. The choreographers who would be featured had their initial doubts. A 1975 New York Times article covering the announcement ceremony at Lincoln Center mentioned that some dancers and attendants which included Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor, were concerned about the limited artistic freedom presented in the rigid structure of Dance in America. In the following decades, we would begin to see choreographers challenge the norms set on Dance in America, as Gere explains.
DAVID GERE: I want to suggest that for those of us who grew up with Dance in America, starting in the 1970s, that that program was teaching us how to see dance on the screen. It taught us that these were the appropriate ways to view dance - wide, medium in close up, and that we could tolerate a certain amount of cutting in between them, as long as we felt like the basic form of the dance was still present to us. This is how we learn to see dance on screen. Now, very soon afterwards, however, you know, even at that time, and in the decade following, there were some new creative innovations and challenges to this standard way of filming or video graphing that began to appear. And probably the most prominent purveyor of these new ideas was Merce Cunningham. He started to work with Charles Atlas in the 1970s. And he, at one point switched over to working with a man named Eliot Kaplan. And both of them were very interested not in duplicating what happens in a theater when you view wide, medium, and close, but rather in adapting a dance or maybe even creating a dance. So that is specifically set up for the way a camera sees. Let's think for a minute about how a camera sees versus the way that human being see. How wide we you know, just looking at me, even right now in the room, how wide is your vision? Kind of tested? What are you seeing? How does it go? Make sense? Most people feel like they're getting close to the 180-degree mark. You can usually see your hands in the periphery, as you extend them this way, which, you know that you're mostly focused right in the center of that peripheral range. Guess what the camera sees? About like this. It's actually a fairly narrow angle, it's a triangular shape. Which means that if someone dances out, say on the camera, and someone dances outside what my arms are working right now, I simply will not see them in the frame. They're gone. They've disappeared. Whereas in real life, of course, I could see them. So what happened with Merce Cunningham working both with Charles Atlas, and Elliott Kaplan, is he began to capitalize on the specific things that that camera angle could do. The camera is not a stable entity now. It's actually moving almost as much as the dancers are. Ah, so much so that now into this triangular shape, we get a foreground, a medium ground, and a background all at the same time. This is an extraordinary thing that you could never do on Dance in America. Now the cameras still is weaving literally through the dancers. It's as though the camera is one of the dancers. It has a kind of volition of its own, it has an active force. One other thing that I wanted to mention before we go on to the next example, is that there are not a lot of cuts. I pointed out a couple of them. And and frankly, I only know that there are cuts there because you can't make an arm suddenly appear out of nowhere without seeing it come into the frame. So I know there had to have been a cut if those two places, but otherwise, that entire segment that we just watched was in one long shot, the camera had to have been on a dolly in order to make that work smoothly working its way through the through the space.
ELLIS ROVIN: Cunningham played with the camera as if it was an active part of the dance, using the rigid shapes of his dancers’ bodies to frame shots, zooming through his dancers’, limbs onto solos, and using sharp cuts to splice dancers in and out of frame. Gere notes that a Dolly was likely used for majority of these shots complementing the smooth manner in which Cunningham moves around the floor, shot in a similar technique to the films of Astaire. I will let Gere introduce the next piece in question.
DAVID GERE: The next example that I want to show you is a piece called, “Falling Down Stairs.” And in fact, some of you might have already seen this on PBS. It was actually aired just this year. And it's a special interest to those of us at the pillow because it was shot here. It was actually shot in the Doris Duke Theater, which is the the smaller theater down the way. It was completely cleared out cleansed no no chairs, so that it could be shot from all angles around 360 degrees. This is a film by and it is again originally film format changed to video by Barbara Willis Sweet. The choreography as I mentioned is by Mark Morris. The costumes are by Isaak Mizrahi, the famous designer, and I think recognize the musician right away. It is Yo Yo Ma, who is playing the Bach, Third Suite for Solo Cello. This is part of a series of choreographies for the camera that were commissioned by Yo Yo Ma and by his supporters, one each for each of the cello suites.
ELLIS ROVIN: After playing Mark Morris's following downstairs for the audience. Gere points out the rather extreme angles present in the film, and goes on to describe how camera perspective is used to distort the space the dancers are occupying. Not unlike the way Seoul trains cuts were used to distort time.
DAVID GERE:And one other very interesting thing is that it literally circles the dance. It is so evident at the end, because you think that you're looking at the front of the dance, when you see that the set of steps from, which later the dancers are going to fall. You think that you're looking at the front of the dance, but in fact, the camera turns around and looks back the other way, so that you see sitting on the platform, Yo Yo Ma, playing the cello. So there actually is no front to this dance as it's set up on camera, which is totally different from what would be the case if it were in a theater. So that's, that's one important thing. I also have to say that I think it would be difficult to try to reconstruct the dance from what we have, because what we have is lots of fragments, we see one person on the floor, you know, doing a particular role, we don't actually know what their physical relationship is to all of the other dancers in space. So, this is not a document, it's not something that's going to help to bring a dance back later. Instead, it's an experience of being in that space with that gorgeous music resounding through it, and that dance just filling it up. So, it's the sense of the wholeness of it rather than the more focused relationship that we might feel if we're sitting in a theater, looking just straight ahead.
ELLIS ROVIN:The following decades would begin to see techniques that still survived today. Many of these advancements can be seen in the various works of Merce Cunningham. Previously, one of Cunningham's most experimental films 1968 “Assemblage,” had begun to play with the burgeoning film effects of the late 60s and 70s. Filmmaker Richard Moore and editor Bill Jaros. Would collage richly colored silhouettes of dancers on top of one another. superimposing figures on a myriad of backgrounds meant to explore San Francisco's changing urban landscape. The film distorts perspective, as Cunningham appears at times to be towering over his company of dancers and others shrunken beneath them. In 1976, Cunningham would collaborate with videographer Charles Atlas and legendary artists Nam Jun Paik on “Merce by Merce,” a revolutionary film celebrating the works of Merce Cunningham as well as Marcel Duchamp. “Merce by Merce,” was initially broadcast on WNET, the same PBS affiliate as Dance in America. In the film, Cunningham, Paik and Atlas take their experimentations even further. Cunningham was multiplied into a crowd of dozens, can be seen partnering with his own outlines, is transported to new locations to an even greater degree, and now interact with text as if it was a full member of his company. I would now like to share an excerpt of WNET’s original broadcast of Merce by Merce.
[Audio from Merce by Merce]
ANNOUNCER: Merce Cunningham's long career has been marked by daring experiment and consummate execution. at Lincoln Center in 1965, he was the first to combine dance with video, foreshadowing a new art form that has become known as video dance. He continues to explore this happy union in this recent work choreographed especially for the TV screen and supervised in every detail by Mr. Cunningham. Purists among Cunningham admirers may prefer to turn the sound down and enjoy 15 minutes of uninterrupted Merce and silence.
[Audio from Merce by Merce]
ELLIS ROVIN:As the world turned digital, and the general public gained the ability to film and publish their own dance videos on platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram, many of these techniques pioneered in the 20th century were still visible. The online dance trend accompanying Drake’s 2018 hit In My Feelings had dancers using their cars as their camera dolly, resting their phone on the center console and having the automobile parallel the dancer’s lateral motion. Many of the effects pioneered by Cunningham and Paik, such as the ability to superimpose a dancer onto new textures and locations, or multiply a single dancer into an entire troupe, are now pre-programmed into social media apps, giving users access to extensive tools for self-expression. While I doubt teenagers are thinking of Merce Cunningham or Fred Astaire while making dance videos, the lasting effect of their legacies is clear. The ease with which we can use technology for self-expression is a gift from the past, given to us by the tinkering and toiling of several generations of artists, a fact we should remember the next time we’re scrolling through social media.
[Music begins, composed, and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or onsite.