PRESS RELEASE
April 23rd 2007
The Screendance Journal is a new, international peer-reviewed journal exploring the field of screendance. It is the first-ever scholarly journal wholly dedicated to this growing area of worldwide inter-disciplinary practice.
The Screendance Journal will engage in rigorous critique grounded in both pre-existing and yet to be articulated methodologies from the fields of dance, performance, visual art, cinema and media arts, drawing on their practices, technologies, theories and philosophies.
This Journal is launched by an international working group made up of practitioners, curators, writers, thinkers and activists engaged with screendance.
Each issue will be edited around a particular set of questions that discuss and reframe current issues, as a means of promoting and enriching dialogue within the wider community of dance and the moving image.
Topics in forthcoming issues will include: politics of the body; agency, race and gender in screendance; the relationship of sound and image; constructs of space and time; representation and effacement; curatorial practice.
The Journal will include original scholarship and historically pertinent yet hard to find writings as well as specially commissioned articles. It will become an invaluable resource for researchers and professionals in the field.
The Screendance Journal is essential reading for all those interested in the intersection of dance and the moving image including film and video-makers, dance artists, producers, composers as well as the wider interested public.
The need for a critical journal has been apparent for some time and was stated again at the two recent international conferences dedicated to screendance: Opensource: (videodance) conference in Findhorn Scotland and Screendance: State of the Art at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina, USA both in 2006. The first issue will be published in 2008.
If you would like further information on the Journal please visit www.screendance.org or email info@screendance.org
The Working Group: Katrina McPherson (University of Dundee), Simon Fildes (University of Dundee), Douglas Rosenberg (University of Wisconsin, Madison USA), Claudia Kappenberg (University of Brighton), Pascale Moyse (Moves Festival Manchester), Chirstinn Whyte (Middlesex University, PhD), Katy Dymoke (Northwest Digital Dance Forum), Kyra Norman (University of Bristol, PhD), Dr Richard James Allen (The Physical TV Company), Dr Karen Pearlman (The Physical TV Company and AFTRS - Australian Film, Television and Radio School)
The Advisory Board: Sherril Dodds PhD, Noel Carroll, Bob Lockyer
Supported by VISIONS, the University of Brighton and School of Media Arts and Imaging/ Dundee University
Biographies
Award-winning video dance maker Katrina McPherson originally trained as a dancer before going on to have a career as a director of arts and documentary programmes for television. Her video dance works, including 'Moment', 'Sense-8' and 'The Truth', have been screened at Festivals all over the World. She is the author of 'Making Video Dance' (Routledge, 2006), the first ever workbook to follow the process of creating dance for the screen from idea through to editing and is currently a Lecturer in Media Arts and Dance at Dundee University.
Simon Fildes was a musician before becoming a video and sound artist. He has edited all Katrina McPherson's video dance works and together they are responsible for the ground-breaking net dance works www.hyperchoreography.org and www.move-me.com. He edits and maintains the video dance portal www.videodance.org.uk. Both Simon and Katrina are part-time researchers and lecturers in Media Arts and Dance at Dundee University and are the directors of Goat Media Ltd. For more information see www.left-luggage.co.uk and www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk.
Douglas Rosenberg is an EMMY nominated director and the recipient of the Phelan Art Award in Video and is wellknown for his screendance collaborations with choreographers such as Molissa Fenley, Sean Curran, Ellen Bromberg, Joe Goode, Li Chiao-Ping. Eiko and Koma and others. His film “My Grandfather Dances” with choreographer Anna Halprin was awarded the Director's Prize at the International Jewish Video Festival in Berkeley, Ca. He organised the first Symposium on Dance For the Camera at UW Madison in 1999 and the conference, Screendance: State of the Art at the American Dance Festival in 2006 and has been the director of the Dancing for the Camera Festival at ADF for more than a decade. He is currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. www.dvpg.net,www.farmwork.org,www.adfvideo.net
Claudia Kappenberg is senior lecturer and researcher in Dance and Visual Art at the University of Brighton. Following a career as a professional dancer Claudia completed an MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London. She has been making performances and screen-based work since 1996 for galleries and site-specific events, showing in Europe and the Middle East. She was a member of the Earthworks Collective producing site-specific festivals in the mid 90s and currently runs the Oolith-Project, a collaborative media and performance project based in Portland, UK. Her video work has been screened internationally at film and dance for camera festivals, see www.ckappenberg.info
'moves' Executive Director and Secretary Pascale Moyse has been working in film, dance and new media for ten years and has run several international festivals including the Quinzaine du Film Francophone in Vienna (Austria) and the Commonwealth Film Festival in Manchester (UK). She founded 'moves' in 2004 as the dance film strand of the Commonwealth Film Festival and developed it into an independent arts organisation in 2006. An active member of various international Screendance networks, she is the representative for screendance activities in the North West of England and is developing a practice-based research on creative curatorship in the same field.
Chirstinn Whyte has worked throughout Britain as a performer, choreographer and teacher for over twenty years and is currently completing doctoral research into choreographic practice for screen at Middlesex University, London. She is co-director of Shiftwork, a Cambridge-based dance and new media partnership, and her work has been shown at screendance and short film festivals and artists' moving image events worldwide.
Katy Dymoke is artistic director of Touchdown Dance, involving visually impaired and sighted dancers. Katy has written and published e-mail correspondence with Steve Paxton (Nouvelles de Danse) and further articles on touch in the Contact Quarterly, Orff Institute journal and Times Education as well as reviews on dance performance work for the Arts Council of England. Having worked with video and dance for many years, Katy co-produced SENSE-8, with Katrina McPherson with a Capture Award involving visually impaired and sighted dancers in Contact Improvisation. Since then she founded and is Chair for the NW Digital Dance Forum (www.nwddf.org) for dancers and film makers. Katy is starting a PHD on the use of touch and is a BMC teacher and practitioner.
Kyra Norman is a performer and filmmaker, whose practice is informed by her background and training in choreography and visual art. She holds a BA (Hons) Dance Theatre from Laban, London and an MA in Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts. She has worked in dance, theatre & film on a wide variety of projects since 1998. She is currently researching a practice-based PhD within the University of Bristol's Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, where her research is around choreographic practice in the context of the screen as site. In 2005 she established The Light Fantastic: movement and moving image events, and curating these events forms part of her active research around dance and moving image. For further information see www.thelightfantastic.co.uk
Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman, Co-Artistic Directors of The Physical TV Company (www.physicaltv.com.au), have created a multi-award winning body of dance on screen work which has been shown over 200 Dancefilm and Film Festivals and other screenings around the world, and been produced in collaboration with and/or broadcast on ABC TV, SBS TV, Southern Cross Television, TV Slovenia and KMTV China. Their latest production, Thursday's Fictions (www.thursdaysfictions.com), won the Gold Medal for Excellence in a Feature Film at the Park City Film Music Festival, the Special flEXiff Award for "film as artwork", and Best Original Song Composed for the Screen, at the APRA-AGSC Screen Music Awards. Thursday's Fictions has been acquired for broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Karen is a former dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and holds a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, two MA's - one in editing (Australian Films, Television and Radio School) and one in media (University of Technology, Sydney). She has recently been awarded a Doctorate of Creative Arts (UTS, 2006) for her thesis, 'Cutting Rhythms', which will be published in 2009 by Focal Press in the USA. Karen has written on dance, film and dancefilm for publications including RealTime, Performance Research, Independent Filmmaker, Metro, and Body Show/S. She teaches at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Atom Award-winning dancefilm director and choreographer.
Richard James Allen is a First Class Honours Graduate of Sydney University and recently won The Chancellor's Award for the most outstanding PhD thesis from the University of Technology, Sydney, for his Doctorate of Creative Arts thesis, Out Of The Labyrinth Of The Mind: Manifesting A Spiritual Art Beyond Dualism. Richard has published nine books, and his writing has appeared in a wide variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies. His latest literary fiction, The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2006), and The Kamikaze Mind dance-film-phone animations are available at www.thekamikazemind.com