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Local students learn art of ‘video dance’ from Italian maestro
Throughout human history, dance has always been a major part of culture
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Throughout human history, dance has always been a major part of culture.
Evidence of people dancing can be seen as early as the 9,000-year-old paintings found at the Bhimbetka rock shelters in India. From simple dances used by prehistoric humans for bonding and communicating during tough times, dance as an art form has over the centuries evolved into one of humanity’s most complex and intricate forms of cultural and artistic expression.
What began as simple rhythms has come to integrate singing, acting and, in more contemporary history, video to create newer and more unique forms of dance.
Video dance is one of the latest growing developments in dance as an art form. It blends the age-old art of dancing with the more recent developments of film and video technology. Not to be mistaken for music videos, which essentially make films on top of a song, video dance pieces use movement as the main focus of telling stories.
“Sometimes they [the results] can be more narrative stories, sometimes more abstract. It’s a genre that combines the field of choreography and dance on one hand, and on the other hand everything that has to do with filmmaking,” said Matteo Marziano Graziano, the artistic director of CASA*MARZIANO art production house and executive board member at COORPI Torino, both based in Italy.
Graziano, whose works have been curated and shown internationally at festivals and places like CINEDANS Amsterdam and Gibney Dance Center New York City, was in Jakarta earlier this month. The Embassy of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) Jakarta invited him to lead a three-day video dance workshop where participants could go through a structured process of making a short filmic sketch that would become the seed project for a longer video dance film.
Held from May 9-12 at the IIC Jakarta auditorium in Central Jakarta, the workshop, titled “Campo Largo Nomads”, offered a compressed version of Campo Largo, a video dance residency project in Turin, Italy, realized by COORPI Torino in collaboration with CASA*MARZIANO and Experimental Film Virginia.
The purpose of this workshop was to challenge, support and focus on the intent behind the films being made and the ideas of the participants. During the workshop the participants were invited to look into storytelling, design, narrative, substance, point of view, the body and the camera.
Graziano mentored the workshop’s 15 participants, who consisted of dance and film students from Jakarta, throughout the video dance-making process, from concept formation through shooting and post production. Lessons learned included choreographic storyboarding, shooting with smart phones and dance classes.
At the end of the three-day workshop, participants screened their short video dance pieces with each other. The resulting video dance projects demonstrated the possibilities of video dance’s applications in artistic expression. One video, for example, depicted two people frantically rearranging chairs in a room, in a piece meant to symbolize the video maker’s anger at the current political situation in Jakarta.
The videos these participants made was part of a video dance tradition of using the body, movement and sensorial experiences to inform the filmmaking process that in Graziano’s home country of Italy was kick-started by a one-minute dance contest called “La Danza In 1 Minuto” by COORPI that began several years ago, though the notion of using the body’s movement to express ideas in film can be traced back to the classic silent movies.
“If you think of [the 1922 film] Nosferatu, movement played the biggest part in cinema. It’s something that emerged in the beginning in cinema, and then of course in the dance field, it found a very large popularity because of the connection with movement,” Graziano said. “Video dance informs in a new way the classical cinematographic and filmmaking processes starting from a physical point of view instead of following the traditional hierarchical setup of the cinema industry.”
Today, forms of video dance can be found in commercials and in the fashion industry. Aside from Italy, video dance is also becoming popular in countries like Germany and states like Virginia in the United States. In the future, Graziano plans to share his experience and knowledge of video dance.
“We are looking forward to open more to Southeast Asia, so being here for us is very important and prestigious, because it means we are able to exchange knowledge with the Southeast Asian community. We are always looking at creative dialogue and farther cultural situations, which I find personally enriching, in this exchange,” Graziano said.
