Media and the No-Place of Dance Harmony Bench (Los Angeles) As dance migrates through visual and electronic media, the number of possible venues in which it might take place multiplies exponentially. From bars and coffee shops to cliffs and factories, from large screens (projection systems and home theaters) to small screens (televisions and computers) to even smaller screens (cellular phones, PDAs, and other hand-held devices). Even the “worlds” in which dances are staged have changed with virtual reality and gaming environments. Media increasingly shape where and how dances are created, where and how they are seen. In this veritable proliferation of locations, there is one I would like to isolate, a site I call no-place. No-place is an abstracted space, a blank or evacuated scene. It is, in a sense, nothing. Nominating no-place as a site for dance may seem somewhat paradoxical, but in identifying no-place, I am trying to theorize the political effects of a site deployed to erase location - a site that works to render itself invisible. No-place, I argue, substantiates dance’s mediation across analogue and digital platforms. Its very emptiness grounds Western dance practices and launches dancing bodies into new sites by erasing topological specificities. I use the term “no-place” as distinct from the concept of “non-place” or “non-lieu” that surfaces in texts by French scholars from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Michel de Certeau and Marc Augé. 1 While non-lieu functions differently for each author, they all use the term to convey a sense of indeterminacy and alterity. For Foucault, non-lieu is a gap or distance between irreconcilable sites, a confrontation between the visible and the articulable. 2 Derrida imagines non-lieu as the “other” of philosophy that he hopes to discover through deconstruction. 3 In Certeau, non-lieux are spatial appropriations carved out of place through constant motion and eroding signification. 4 Building on Certeau, Augé argues that non-lieux are nonspecific spaces of passage - shopping malls, airports, hotels - sites that are neither here nor there but on the way to somewhere else. 5 Non-lieu may be a site of opposition or an indeterminate mutating or eroding space, but it is not conceived of as an empty vacuum in these authors’ texts. “[W]e do not live in some kind of void”, Foucault argues. 6 Yet it is precisely this void, absent of spatial and political markers and relations, that no-place proposes. As a site, no-place entails its own protocols for imagining, creating, framing, and reading dance. Abstracted from built or natural environments that would situate their movement, bodies wander through space with an illusory freedom, unrestricted by physical or ideological barriers. Extractions of dance from place, enabled through both print and digital mediation, necessarily presuppose that dance can exist completely outside or independent of place. In its very abstract emptiness, no-place instantiates an a priori decontextualization, a fundamental divorce of mathematical spatial constructs from lived environments. Additionally, no-place operates in tandem with other sites, which may include media as well as other geographic and physical locales. Dance filmmaker Douglas Rosenberg, for example, argues that video constitutes its own choreographic site that must be examined as such. 7 Working in screendance, 8 as Rosenberg does, one must consider what the location of the film shoot, the medium of film or video, the screen itself, and even the circumstances Forum Modernes Theater, Bd. 23/ 1 (2008), 37-47. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 38 Harmony Bench of viewing bring to bear on a screen-based work. As another example, dance and theater companies increasingly integrate digital visual media elements into their stage-based productions. The frequent appearance of screens and monitors in performance settings complicates and multiplies the sites represented “onstage”. These overlapping sites - geographies and media that dis-locate as much as they locate dance - easily go unnoticed, as does the no-place that frequently supports them. No-place is perhaps most visible onscreen and in digital media’s graphic environments, but it is not a new place synonymous with cyberspace, electronic space, screen space, or virtual space. This empty and flattened terrain, “planar, linear, [and] firm”, functions, according to culture and performance theorist Paul Carter, “as the metaphysical ground of Western art”. 9 Indeed, no-place is wellestablished, if not generally acknowledged, in Western dance history. Its foundational emptiness already appeared in the late 17 th century when Raoul Auguste Feuillet began clearing a space for dance on the printed page. Dancing in the Clearing: Feuillet To complement the many improvements in French court ballet technique since the establishment of the Academie Royale de la Danse in 1661, King Louis XIV charged dancing master Pierre Beauchamps with the task of “discover[ing] the means of making the art of dance comprehensible on paper”. 10 That course of research resulted in Feuillet’s 1700 publication Chorégraphie, ou l’art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs. 11 Feuillet’s main objective with his notation system was to provide a means of preserving dance. 12 But as notators recorded the time-filled movements of dance in timedepleted print media, they also documented a historical understanding of space and dancing bodies’ relationship to it. In Feuillet notation, the site of dance is neutralized, an unmarked no-place in which dance is inscribed. It begins with a blank page - a place, Certeau notes, “where the ambiguities of the world have been exorcised” 13 - onto which dancers’ movements and pathways are traced. Feuillet’s planimetric dance notation system imagines the dancing body as the vertical axis of a geometric grid. This body opens out onto a vacant space where the dance unfolds. A curved line traces the dancer’s spatial pathway on the page, emphasizing the orientation of a body in space and the directions in which that body moves. Placed on either side of this line are symbols that denote the various actions a particular dance requires - for example, batterie, turns, and jumps - while maintaining the dancer’s relationship to the designated path. Together, they track a dancer’s trajectory and progress through space and illustrate the movement of feet and legs. 14 The notation score channels dancers into the blank scene in which the dance has been inscribed. The document, aligned with an unchanging architectural reference, provides a spatial absolute, a “true north” to orient the dance. In graphing a dancer’s movement, Feuillet notation requires that a dancer locate him or herself within a corollary grid as he or she follows the paths and actions mapped out on the page. “Thus the graphing of motion summons the body into and locates it within a geometrically defined grid stipulating both horizontal and vertical positionings”, notes dance historian and theorist Susan Leigh Foster. 15 Feuillet notation installs the dancing body, a vertical axis perpendicular to both floor and page, in a no-place of intersecting geometric planes. Imagining dance’s occurrence in such an abstract, idealized space is perhaps a precondition for its paper-based mediation and documentation. However, no-place is not the Media and the No-Place of Dance 39 apolitical space it imagines itself to be. Rather, as an unmarked terrain for movement, noplace links Western dance practices with colonialism. Carter establishes a causal link between colonialism’s flattening of the ground and the smoothed and emptied spaces - the even floors of dance studios and theaters - presupposed in Western concert dance forms. The ground, Carter argues, “is theatricalized as a void, a tabula rasa available for imperial overwriting”. 16 According to Carter, the leveling impact of colonialism enables dancers’ unfettered movement. “Logically, and perhaps historically”, he argues, “the colonizing explorer precedes the pirouetting dancer”. 17 Colonialism thus paves the way for dance, “creat[ing] the conditions for the emergence of the planar ground occupied by the dancer”. 18 The dancer, who cannot clear the ground simply by dancing, follows in the colonizer’s wake. Constructing a genealogy alternative to Carter’s, Foster posits a kinesthetic sensibility underlying both Europe’s colonialism and its dance practices. Feuillet’s portrayal of dancing bodies evidences the construction of a colonial physicality built upon a shared conceptualization of space. At a representational level, Feuillet notation describes a subject that establishes himself as a center from which to govern a periphery. That periphery may be corporeal, in the refined gestures of arms and legs, or geographic, in the assessment of territories laid out before one’s gaze. Foster further argues that Feuillet notation “reinforce[s] a bodily experience of […] extend[ing] into and mov[ing] through an unmarked space”. 19 The cultivation of this “bodily experience” in dancers parallels that of explorers moving into foreign and unknown lands. As Foster shows, Feuillet’s notation system does not simply document a dance’s progress through space. It represents a colonial understanding of space and demonstrates the cultivation of a colonial kinesthetic awareness in dancing bodies. 20 Furthermore, Feuillet notation schools dancing bodies to move into the evacuated space it presupposes. As dancers follow notation scores, they rehearse the colonial expansion that Feuillet stages on paper. Feuillet’s dance notation system documents a spatial and kinesthetic history of colonialism first by siting dance in an empty no-place, and then recording movement within that evacuated terrain. No-place projects its empty geometry onto foreign territories into which dancing or colonizing bodies may then step, seemingly without consequence. No-place as a “theatricalized void” thus underwrites both European concert dance and European colonialism. It eases corporeal transitions among geographic and other sites by erasing barriers to movement, imagining razed terrain in advance of and alongside imperial flattening. Similarly, screenic no-places isolate dance and dancer in blank, unmarked spaces emptied of geopolitical signification. No-place disentangles choreography from the site of performance, disarticulating dancers from the grounds on which they stand. In dance onscreen, once dissociated from a particular location, dancers access a heightened, media-enabled mobility. Just as colonial imaginings of space opened up new lands for occupation, no-place surreptitiously slides dance into new screenic sites by erasing the specificities of locale. Radically dis-located and thus existing in no place in particular, dancing bodies can easily move from one place to any other. No-place in Dance Onscreen Like Feuillet notation, a number of mediabased choreographies obscure the locatedness of dance altogether, siting dance within an anonymous no-place. Choreographers and filmmakers utilize black curtains and floors in 40 Harmony Bench Fig. 1: Gina Czarnecki: Nascent Fig. 2: Magali Charrier: Left or Right for Love? darkened theaters to blot out place. They set dancers against infinity cycs 21 in film studios, minimizing shadows with bounced light. Or they configure computer programs to completely envelop dancers in a void. As a site in screendance, no-place is emptied of spatial referents - dancers float in limbo, surrounded by a field of white or a black abyss. This erasure is more profound than in Feuillet notation, which at least orients a dancer in a room to which the printed page corresponds, and which tracks movement across the floor. In screendance, not only are the geographical markers erased, gone, too, are the architectural bearings derived from floors, walls, corners, or curves. Masked and whitewashed screenscapes insistently foreground dancing bodies dis-articulated from a ground and environment that support their movement. No longer contained within theater’s rectangular enclosures, dancing bodies are rendered as free-floating images in smooth, shapeless spaces. The past ten years have seen the production of several notable screendance works in which dancing bodies are surrounded by a seeming nothingness. For example, in Gina Czarnecki’s experimental video Nascent, 22 luminous bodies unfurl across a blackened screen. A dancer hangs from invisible wires, suspended in endless white in Magali Charrier’s Left or Right for Love? . 23 In Alex Reuben’s Line Dance, 24 motion-captured figures moving to Brazilian music are engulfed in black, erasing both geographical specificities as well as the dancers’ physical specificities. Cari Ann Shim Sham*’s Are You for Real 25 installs and multiplies a Post-It Note-wearing, grey-bodied dancer in a white space. David Michalek filmed some 45 dancers at high speed against black backdrops for his suspended-animation multi-screen installation Slow Dancing. 26 In each of these pieces, dancing bodies sited in no-place take on an inhuman mobility. They are unrestricted by physical or ideological boundaries and untroubled by forces such as gravity. Abstracted from built or natural environments that would contextualize their movement, bodies drift across the screen with an illusory freedom. Other screendances go a step further, maintaining the abstraction of no-place, while also placing topographically detached bodies in different settings. 27 Examples include Ghostcatching, 28 in which digital artist Shelley Eshkar creates shifting environments out of Bill T. Jones’s motion-captured movement residues and Magali Charrier’s Tra La La, 29 where dancers wind up in the bellies of various animated creatures in the course of their fantastical adventures. Editing and compositing analogue or digital images, artists easily achieve such transport from one place to another. Just as Feuillet permitted physical Media and the No-Place of Dance 41 Fig. 4: Screen Shot Richard Lord: Waterfall Fig. 3: Screen Shot Richard Lord: Waterfall bodies to move into empty spaces equated with the page, so, too, these image-bodies are free to move into new environments. They are not tied down. Local affiliations have been rendered invisible by black boxes, white screens, and other technologies of abstraction. This freedom of movement is further explored in hyperdances, which specifically locate dancing bodies on the computer screen. Hyperdances are interactive dances created for computer rather than theatrical platforms. They are often built in Macromedia (now Adobe) Director or Flash, and are usually found on CD-ROM or on the Internet. Hyperdances combine still images and/ or pre-recorded digital video clips of dancing bodies with computer users’ realtime navigation. Users are encouraged to participate in a piece’s evolution by activating video clips, dragging dancing images to new positions in the frame, clicking through possible movements, and mousing over the computer screen in search of invisible buttons and unanticipated changes. Through these actions , users generate their own choreographies for the dancing images onscreen. In exploring the computer screen as a performance venue, hyperdances also posit a no-place for dance. Like the screendances described above, some hyperdances visually represent no-place as an unbounded monochromatic space, while others project dance into any number of computerized environments. Having been extracted from a place and sited in no-place as images, bodies take on an uncanny ability to move from one location to virtually any other. Additionally, hyperdances re-conceive the correspondence between dancer and ground, creating a very different relationship between body and space than that which Feuillet represented on paper. The ground remains planar as in Feuillet, but is now upended, propped up vertically as a desktop image rather than a horizontal plane of movement. Displacing the ground as a stable horizontal terrain with a changeable background image, hyperdances are able to explore physically impossible and occasionally absurd environments in which to locate dance. Richard Lord’s Waterfall, 30 a hyperdance on CD-ROM, serves as a case in point. Throughout this work, dancer Emma Diamond sensuously engages water through various explorations: walking along a grassy and windy beach, feeling water pour through her fingers or drip onto her face, and splashing barefoot in puddles. In using the computer as a platform for these sensory investigations, Waterfall positions nature and technology alongside one another. Water spills onto the screen, even as the electronic circuitry underneath Diamond’s mediated interactions resists the moist encounters represented. In one particular section of 42 Harmony Bench Fig. 5: Screen Shot Marikki Hakola: Triad Hyper Dance Waterfall, Diamond’s luxurious and focused task-like investigations give way to water studies of a different kind where Diamond seems to dance on a river, below the ocean’s surface, on a cresting wave, in a rainforest, on a glacier, among other sites through which users navigate. Lord recorded Diamond in what appears to be a dance studio or black box theater, extracted her dancing image, and overlaid it onto images of water. He cleverly matched Diamond’s movement to each background, suturing them together to encourage an illusory integration of dancer and scene. Diamond thus skips through a cresting wave and gently glides across the surface of an icy glacier. While Diamond dances with abandon, however, the oceans, lakes, and rivers remain disturbingly stationary - still images onto which Diamond is projected. With his cut-and-paste technique, Lord insinuates dance into places in which “dancing”, at least of the sort in which Diamond engages, could not actually occur. Confronted with neither the force of moving water, nor that of gravity, Diamond snakes across rapids and walks on water. She maps the liquid motion onto her body, while Lord stills the oceans and rivers behind her in his idealized photographic representations. Furthermore, the nameless bodies of water onto which Lord projects Diamond’s dancing provide little context for her dancing. They seem to have been chosen for their formal properties rather than geographical significance or communicative value. Diamond choreographically interprets the water’s movement in each scene, adapting her dance to reflect each new environment. But in fact she does not dance in any of the places represented onscreen, which, in their postcard-like perfection, have already ceased to be places. The images function only to signify generic watery environments in Lord’s romanticized portrayal of dance and nature. The photographed sites have no identity except as unlikely venues for Diamond’s dancing. Even with Lord’s careful compositing, Waterfall struggles to maintain a seamless connection between Diamond and each body of water onscreen. This tension is due in part to the uncharacteristic stillness of each site, but it is also a result of the environmental extraction that allows Diamond to appear against each background. Lord aligned his camera angles to those from which the waterscapes were photographed, but the water still repels Diamond, refusing to fully integrate her. Though Lord tightly cropped the footage of Diamond’s dancing, residues of the black floor on which she originally danced show through. Her reflections in its shiny surface undermine Lord’s photographic sleight-of-hand, reminding viewers that Diamond is located not in the watery venues portrayed, but somewhere else, in some other erased space. Ultimately, Diamond sits in noplace, a dancing image hovering over emptied imaginations of place. A second dance for computer, Triad HyperDance 31 also mediates contact among distant geographies. Triad is a Web-based, interactive documentation of the 1998 telematic performance Triad NetDance 32 directed by Marikki Hakola, featuring modern dancer Molissa Fenley in New York Media and the No-Place of Dance 43 Fig. 6: Screen Shot Marikki Hakola: Triad Hyper Dance and butoh performer Akeno in Tokyo. Fenley and Akeno were joined by video transmitted over the Internet and projected into the Kiasma museum in Helsinki, the primary performance venue. In Helsinki, the feeds from New York and Tokyo were mixed with other visual imagery and music. Linking the cities together created a complex and interwoven site that drew on aspects of all three. Via their Internet connection, the performers forged a temporary and contingent relationship with each city, technologically extending the reach of each location into the others. Scrolling upward, users navigate an electronic mise en scène littered with metal grates, lotus flowers, and images of Fenley and Akeno. As users “follow the Triad path”, they click on buttons strewn along the way. They may activate streamed video documentations of the performance in pop-up windows or enter new scenes in which skyscrapers, fire escapes, pools of water, and parchment provide the backgrounds against which Fenley and Akeno dance. Triad presents a landscape of entwined pictorial references to urban and pastoral scenes - concrete and metal tempered by gardens and ponds. Whereas in Waterfall Diamond introduces distinct choreographies for each of her liquid encounters, the dancers in Triad do not alter their movement in accordance with their changing background environments. Instead, Triad offers computer users the same selection of six very short, looped movements for each dancer in every scene, which users organize into their own choreographies. Akeno remains low in squats and crawls, while Fenley stands largely upright, cycling through attitudes and turns. The changing scenes have no impact on their movement repertoire; they could be projected against any background and it would not affect their dancing. In contrast to Waterfall, no attempt is made in Triad to merge dancers and background images. Dancers and background are stacked in parallel planes, one in front of the other, in a move that aestheticizes the underlying software structure. 33 Users further compose the scene by clicking and dragging the dancers anywhere within the browser window. Still, as images, the dancers register no change from one place to the next. As with Feuillet notation, all places appear equally undifferentiated as flattened spaces for movement, and the same movement vocabularies remain sufficient for every context. 34 Feuillet notation and digital images find in no-place a common springboard into any place. As illustrated in Feuillet notation, noplace eases the dancer/ colonizer’s passage into new terrains by erasing all barriers to movement. No-place obscures both the labor required to move and the geo-political realities of each site. In digital media, no-place lubricates the transition among places by erasing the act of “getting there” in what digital performance theorist Gabriella Giannachi describes as “hypertextual travel”. 35 Following Paul Virilio’s claim that “‘we are seeing the beginning of a “generalized arrival” whereby everything arrives without having to leave,’” 36 Giannachi argues that hypertextual travel involves “no real movement”. “Everything happens”, she remarks, “without us needing to go anywhere”. 37 In both Waterfall and Triad, where a click of a button will change the scene, there are no more departures or 44 Harmony Bench traversals of space. Perhaps there are no real arrivals either, just transposable backdrops framing mathematical translations in space. The movement from place to place simulated in Waterfall and Triad presupposes that dance and dancers can be imagined independent of context - that dance, existing nowhere in particular, can appear everywhere equally. Such is the function of no-place in both Feuillet notation and hyperdance: to make it seem as though dance practices are rooted to nothing. However, there are key differences between Feuillet notation and hyperdance in how abstracted bodies move through no-place from one place to another and in the consequences of their appearance. As mentioned earlier, Foster argues that Feuillet’s portrayal of dancing bodies reflects a colonial organization of space and the bodies therein. Feuillet represents a subject who occupies a central location from which to survey and move into outlying terrain. In hyperdance, however, there is no longer a designated center or periphery. The dancers in Waterfall and Triad are projected into environments with which they remain fundamentally disconnected; they are cutouts sitting atop a collage of images with which they are juxtaposed, but of which they remain unaware. Triad especially flattens the differences among dancing images and digitally rendered environments. The dancers neither govern from a central place, nor oversee the landscape from an idealized external perspective. Instead, they float above the background, indifferent to successive image-based substitutions of one place for another. In performance and on the Web, Triad’s intent was to enfold disparate locations into one cyber-site. Yet, differences among the sites are all but erased as they become interchangeable scenery in a tourist-like utopian globalism. Helsinki, New York, and Tokyo - Fenley and Akeno travel the world without really going anywhere at all. Just as Foster finds colonial resonances in Feuillet notation, some media scholars have argued that digital media’s repeated evacuations of space are similarly implicated in an expansionist project. Indeed, the enormous commercial and social investments in imagining cyberspace as an endless electronic frontier to be filled with online communities, trade, and even alternate worlds makes such a reading attractive. Neo-colonial interpretations of digital spaces depend, in part, upon a characterization of such spaces as in some way occupiable by a computer user who, again, “extends into and moves through an unmarked space”, whose movements through that space are strategically configured as “value-free”, and whose labor in journeying across that space is obscured. 38 In my analyses of Waterfall and Triad, I have followed a similar line of argumentation, describing the ease with which the dancers appear in each new environment. And yet, bringing these pieces immediately under a colonial framework overlooks the nuances of how these mediated dancers relate to their computerized surroundings in comparison with the bodies and spaces Feuillet documented on paper. Crucially, the dancing images in Waterfall and Triad are not avatars of computer users. 39 Whereas representations of bodily movements in Feuillet notation summon dancers into a written scene, in hyperdance the dancing images are almost never digital representations of computer users, whose onscreen presence is reduced to a cursor. Users influence the dancers’ positions and movements by mousing and clicking over the screen, but the interactive figures remain images of other performers and not of the users. They neither duplicate users onscreen, nor offer characters whose identities or roles users temporarily take on. 40 Furthermore, unlike the colonial model embedded in Feuillet notation, the digitallyextracted dancing images in Waterfall and Triad do not move into spaces of their own Media and the No-Place of Dance 45 accord. Nor do they command the landscape around them. Located in a transparent noplace, they are overlaid onto background image after background image. Both of these hyperdances operate under the assumption, present in Western concert dance traditions at least since Feuillet, that dances could exist in an empty no-place and could thus appear in any place. But unlike dancers following Feuillet’s marks on the page, these digital images of dancing bodies are deposited into spaces - a drag and drop process. The dancers never forge a connection with each new place. Indeed, the very technologies used to bring dancing and background images together reinforce their separation - the visual layers are not merged but stacked, impenetrable to one another. While both print and digital media posit an abstract, evacuated scene for dance, their spatial imaginings result in very different occupations of space. The dancing images in hyperdance may have greater mobility, transported as they are from place to place, but they do not move by choice, nor do they belong to any of the places in which they appear. Waterfall and Triad choreographically elaborate upon digital visual media as sites through which turn of the 21 st century bodies access disparate or remote geographies. They represent weightless, ungrounded, and transposable dances and dancers in the place of weight-filled bodies, 41 and substitute visual backdrops for the physical grounds dancers would otherwise require. Even as Waterfall and Triad delight in dance’s digitally reconfigured mobility, both pieces struggle to maintain a connection between the dancers and each new environment. Disarticulated from their grounds, the digital dancers in Waterfall and Triad do not move in relation to or in defiance of a ground, but hover and suspend indifferently in sites evacuated of context and meaning. They dance in no-place. As translations of dance to print and digital media, Feuillet notation and hyperdance re-imagine dancing bodies according to their media-specific protocols. In the process, their transformations or mediations reveal what might otherwise remain under-examined assumptions about how dance inhabits space. With this essay, I have been particularly interested in dance’s relationship to what I have called no-place, and how its abstract logic continues to propel dance into new sites. Notably, erasing dance’s prior instantiations and siting dance in no-place is not without its consequences. Indeed, all sites of dance carry ideological weight. In developing a notation system, Feuillet inscribed a colonial spatiality and physicality in Western concert dance. In hyperdance, radically dis-located dancers access an increased mobility, but their unmooring inhibits all other connections to place. How no-place gets deployed and by whom changes over time - as a tool of colonial expansion in one context, and as a seemingly neutral space of global flows in another. Noplace’s characteristic emptiness and selfeffacement continuously allows it to function as a site in print media, imaging technologies, and cyberspace, as well as the vacant spaces of dance studios and theaters. Where else does no-place emerge? What movement strategies does no-place enable in addition to those I have discussed here? How do the tensions between physical location and technological dis-location and/ or dispersal play out in noplace? How does no-place negotiate both the global and the local, for example among an international community of viewers on YouTube or in a virtual community such as Second Life? Such questions are beyond the scope of this essay, which is only a preliminary study of no-place as a site for dance on page and screen. In this initial consideration, I hope to have demonstrated some of the ways in which no-place operates across “old” and “new” media to open up spaces for movement, and begun to gesture toward possible theoretical as well as choreographic 46 Harmony Bench implications of perpetuating a digital noplace. As ever, thanks to Susan Foster and Jeannine Murray-Román for their comments and insights. Anmerkungen 1 For good summaries of how the term nonplace functions in French texts, see Bruno Bosteels, “Nonplaces: An Anecdoted Topography of Contemporary French Theory”, in: diacritics 33.3/ 4 (2003), pp. 117-139 and Laurence Louppe, “Modes de production: Hétérotopies, non-lieux, espaces quelconques”, in: Poétique de la danse contemporaine. Brussels 2007, pp. 137-145. 2 See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis 1988, pp. 68, 87. 3 See Bosteels, 125. 4 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley 1984, p. 106. 5 Marc Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris 1992, pp. 120-121. 6 Qtd. Louppe, 292. My translation. 7 Douglas Rosenberg, “Video Space: A Site for Choreography”, in: Leonardo 33: 4 (2000), pp. 275-280, p. 275. 8 Screendance is the term most recently adopted to encompass what has variously been called dance film, video dance, dance for camera, and cinedance. The term is also applied to dances for computer, media installations, and other screened or projected dances. Screendances are works created specifically for the screen or monitor and not for the purpose of documenting a performance. 9 Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land, London 1996, p. 292. 10 Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing Empathy”, in: Topoi 24 (2005), pp. 81-91, p. 87. 11 Raoul Auguste Feuillet, [1700] Chorégraphie, ou l’art de décrire la danse par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs, Forni 1970. 12 Feuillet’s system further elaborated an entire symbolic, analytical schema for the purpose of documenting dance. Feuillet broke danced movements into their component parts in his effort to discover a set of movement elements common to all dance traditions. These building blocks gave dance masters/ choreographers a means of creating and disseminating new dances. With the advent of Feuillet notation, they could both notate pre-existing dances and choreograph new dances by arranging Feuillet’s symbols on the page. 13 Certeau, p. 134. 14 Notably, only a body’s lower half is depicted in Feuillet notation. Arm and hand movements were perhaps considered inessential to the choreographed movement, or were so unified with the leg and foot movements that common knowledge rendered them unnoticeable. Visual representation of the movement of feet and legs implies the rest of a body moving in concert. 15 Foster, “Choreographing Empathy”, p. 88. 16 Carter, p. 305. 17 Carter, p. 291. 18 Carter, p. 291. 19 Foster, “Choreographing Empathy”, p. 88. 20 Susan Leigh Foster, “The Earth Twice Shaken Wonderfully”, in: Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and Tracy C. Davis, Tel Aviv 2007, pp. 151-168. p. 156. 21 An infinity cyc curves at the bottom to seamlessly flow into the floor. By smoothing the 90 degree angle between floor and wall, filmmakers and photographers can produce a visual illusion of an unlimited space continuing out infinitely. 22 Nascent, dir. Gina Czarnecki, chor. Garry Stewart, prod. Forma and Australian Dance Theater 2005. 23 Left or Right for Love? , dir. Magali Charrier, chor. Maria Lloyd, prod. Amanda Lloyd; Linda Jasper, South East Dance; Caroline Freeman, Lighthouse 2003. 24 Line Dance, dir. and chor. Alex Reuben, cochor. Afua Awuku, prod. Margaret Williams; Caroline Freeman, MJW Productions 2003. 25 Are You for Real, dir. Kyle Ruddick and Cari Ann Shim Sham*, chor. Cari Ann Shim Sham*, prod. Eyestorm 2006. Media and the No-Place of Dance 47 26 Slow Dancing, dir. David Michalek, prod. David Michalek and Moving Portrait, Inc. 2007. 27 Frederick S. Armitage’s Neptune’s Daughters is a much earlier example of strategically combining incongruous locations. In this doublyexposed film, music hall performers dance atop the ocean surf. See Neptune’s Daughters, [1900], dir. Frederick S. Armitage in: Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, disc 7: Viva la Dance: The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance, prod. Anthology Film Archives, 2005. Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night is another notable example. See The Very Eye of Night, [1958], dir. Maya Deren, chor. Anthony Tudor in: Maya Deren: Experimental Films, prod. Mystic Fire Video, 2002. 28 Ghostcatching, dir. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, chor. and perf. Bill T. Jones, prod. Riverbed 1999. 29 Tra La La, dir. and chor. Magali Charrier, prod. Mairead Turner, South East Dance; Kathleen Smith, Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film and Video 2004. 30 Waterfall, dir. and chor. Richard Lord, CD- ROM, prod. Big Room Ventures 2002. 31 Triad HyperDance, dir. Marikki Hakola, chor. and perf. Akeno and Molissa Fenley, 1998-1999, from: Ctheory Multimedia, edd. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Issue 1: Digital Dirt. <http: / / ctheory.concordia.ca/ multimedia/ dirt/ triadhyperdance/ triad/ index. html>. Accessed 1 May 2007. 32 Triad NetDance, dir. Marikki Hakola, chor. and perf. Akeno and Molissa Fenley, prod. Sanna-Kaisa Hakkarainen and Marikki Hakola, Kroma Productions; Tomoe Shizune and Hakutobo; Joseph Di Matta, Dance Theater Workshop 1998. 33 By stacking the background and dancing images rather than attempting a realistic fusion, Triad reveals Macromedia Director’s layering hierarchies, in which images are stacked according to visibility. In other words, the “front-most” images, here the dancers, occupy the top-most layers in Director. Triad encompasses and even aestheticizes Director’s structural logic, enabling users to see through Triad’s images to the software supporting the work. 34 Feuillet notation was intended to bring all dance forms under a single sign system, regardless of origin. Further, dance notation documents, as transportable records of new choreographies, allowed dances to be realized on bodies far removed (geographically or historically) from the choreographer, thus enabling the training of remote bodies in specific movement and cultural values. As Foster argues in “Choreographing Empathy”, “Implementing this bodily disciplining, the colonial regime could first institute protocols of comportment at home and then proliferate these standards and indexes of behavior to those foreign bodies that it desired to govern abroad”, p. 88. 35 Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theaters: An Introduction, London 2004, p. 17. 36 Giannachi, p. 17. Original emphasis. 37 Giannachi, p. 17. Original emphasis. 38 Foster, “Choreographing Empathy”, p. 88. 39 This marks a difference between hyperdance and online theater worth critical examination. 40 I have argued elsewhere that some hyperdances ask computer users to enter into a more sensuous relationship, offering something of a contact improvisation with onscreen images. Such hyperdances still do not represent users onscreen as an avatar or character. See “Of Skins and Screens: Hyperdance, Haptic Cinema, and Contact Improvisation” in: Extensions Journal 3 (2007), n.p. <http: / / www.performancestudies.ucla.edu/ extensionsjournal/ >. Accessed 15 Nov. 2007. 41 In contrast, Paul Virilio suggests that Feuillet notation “bring[s] weightiness into perception”. He notes that the object of Feuillet notation is a body’s perpetual fall from one foot to the other - the dancer’s transfer of weight. See Virilio, “Gravitational Space” in: Traces of Dance: Drawing and Notation of Choreographers, ed. Laurence Louppe, trans. Brian Holmes. Marsat 1994, pp. 35-59. p. 37. In Waterfall and Triad, as well as the other screendances I mentioned, the artists play with weightlessness, achieving their resistances to gravity through technological means.