The Dancer and the Looking Glass

This thesis concerns the relationship between the dancer, the camera, and the screen viewer in the making and watching of screendance. It documents a personal journey of exploration that has my own creative practice, located within the wider field of screendance, as a central thread.

The research identifies a divide, with respect to control and authorship, which exists between the performer on one side of the lens and filmmakers on the other. It explores, through practice, production methodologies that challenge and narrow this divide. It finds that the small scale, single-take, single mobile camera dancing/filming event can help close the divide between dancer, camera. The research also finds that there are significantly few screendance works that are made as single-take films. As a tangent to this finding, it also finds that screendance works, like in mainstream films, are trending towards increasingly short shot lengths.

In addition to the information that I bring together from films, theorists, and interviews, the thesis draws on nineteen short films that I have made as part of this research and concludes with the production of The Glasshouse (2016), a screendance that summarises a number of the core findings of The Dancer and the Looking Glass.