Dancehouse, Melbourne.
27 November 2024.
Early in 2015, I was lucky enough to see the first iteration of Sue Healey’s On View during the Dance Massive festival in Melbourne. Later that year, in an interview for Dance Informa, she told me, “I love the gap between the real and the unreal. Although theatre has always played with this, dance perhaps hasn’t because it’s a very ‘in the moment’ artform. But as soon as you bring in the filmed body, it gives you many other things to play with.”
Nearly a decade later, at the same venue, Healey’s now long running screen project is back, as part of a taster for next year’s Dance (Lens) event. Shown in tandem with Siobhan Murphy’s Doing The Work and Cobie Orger and Alice Cummins’ terra (installation 2024), it once again highlights both the potential and problems of dance on film.
As an ephemeral artform and nigh universal expression, dance is primarily located in the moment and in the body. Unlike music, it has no standard notation to make it easily replicable. (Neither are its recordings as ubiquitous or adored.) The routines we see in Holly & Bollywood productions and K-pop videos, or on the shiny floors of franchise TV, rarely puncture the surface of virtuosity, and are almost never as visceral and engaging as watching dancers on stage.
However, the camera is an extraordinary eye. It sees in a way that is not quite human. As such, it offers a different look. In dance, this typically translates as close-ups, slow motion and location changes. Although the filmmaker may have a more flexible toolkit at their disposal (including all the tricks of post), the creative challenge is not merely to capture or edit but to use the medium as a form of choreography.
Of the three works screened as part of Moving Portraits, only Healey’s comes anywhere near this. Although both Doing The Work and terra are finely crafted, thoughtfully constructed films, they each highlight the stage/screen fissure. They remain dry and flat, moving in a nowhere land, neither a dance nor a film. As art, they feel like a hard surface, a white wall gallery that leaves you chin-stroking, wondering if you are missing something.
In contrast, On View: Icons is lush, human, graceful and (in spite of its more documentary format), choreographic. By which I mean, the six 10-minute vignettes that make up this work are themselves a dance. Together with cinematographer Judd Overton and composer Darrin Verhagen, Healey has created one of the most elegant and beautiful anthologies of short dance films you could wish to see.
She is helped in this by the exceptional dancers she features, all ‘icons’ of the industry in Australia. As such, her films have personality. More than that, a sense of presence. As though the fourth wall were porous, the frame dancing. Indeed, at moments, you wonder if she and her collaborators are edging close a new choreographic language.
Having said all that, what Moving Portraits also makes clear is that we, the viewer, may need to change our way of seeing, of relating to dance. What is and isn’t dance, etcetera? Some of the embedded problems that dance film creators face reside in our commonly preconceived ideas about both artforms. While films about dance are relatively simple and abundant, films that are dance are much harder to come by.
In presenting these works, Dancehouse invites us to revisit what we think possible for both choreography and camera. Even if some combinations don’t land, it is clear that the act of translation is itself a kind of tango. The push and pull may not always create harmony, but even in its missteps, it is leading us somewhere; and the most pertinent question may well be: can we follow?
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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