Manifest
Dance-film festival
28 Jul 2023 to 30 Jul 2023
https://auroapaar.org/festival/
What has actually manifested itself? The moving images that emerged from the latent images and 'came to life' in their sequence of at least 24 frames per second, these images of dancers who, according to their genre, were already at the beginning of cinematography, these images were shown at the Dance-Film Festival Manifest from July 28 to 30, 2023 at the Alliance Française in Pondicherry.
During the 2.5 days of the festival in the Alliance Française event room, 40 short films were shown. I actually just wanted to pop in and 'support' the first set of films, as I know they are often not well attended. I stayed for 2.5 days and watched every film, every live performance and, as far as the program allowed, attended the master classes. I was electrified. I only know such an intense art experience from big biennials or media festivals.
I kept asking myself what manifests itself here. Various media theories came to mind: Dziga Vertov's Kinoeye and the universal language of film, which is not bound to any language and enables the world to unite in the sense of a proletarian revolution. Or Godard's famous quote that the truth consists of 24 images per second and the media-critical theories derived from this, which deal with fictionality, lies and representation. And, of course, Gilles Deleuze and his homage to Henri Bergson's theory of the cinematographer. Deleuze turns Bergson's critique of film into a hymn of praise by understanding the technical quality of film editing as active thinking, as pure philosophy. But none of this, not even the theory of the moving image, seemed to me to grasp the phenomenon of this dance film festival.
A new genre?
Through their work, the organizers posed the question of whether a new genre is forming here. What is a genre? What is formed in which manifestation? Dance! An archaic form of expression that goes back to the animal kingdom, and at the same time one of the most complex, as it understands the whole body as a medium of expression. Dance is the movement of a body in space. The connection of body, space and time, interwoven through rhythm, is perhaps one of the most complex and challenging forms of expression for a 2-dimensional, linear medium such as film. The predetermined camera perspective, the frame of the image, the technical structure of the apparatus - all this works against dance. And so, for me, dance films have always been experimental or banal. Banal when it was simply a recording of a performance, experimental when individual segments of an otherwise continuous expression were expanded and contextualized through editing and montage and often ended in a rather cryptic sequence of movement intervals that could only be understood by insiders.
Perhaps I'll start very specifically, with the place where all this is taking place. An event room that is wonderfully suited as a movie theater. A stage in front of it. The festival is in Pondicherry, a former French colony in India, this colorful subcontinent with countless languages and traditions. This multicultural subcontinent, which was rather arbitrarily united by the British in 1947 through a national border, has chosen dance as one of its central, unifying cultural forms. There is a lot of dancing, at weddings and temple festivals, in Bollywood and at village festivals. Dance is omnipresent in many areas of society in India. It was therefore all the more surprising to see that no major Indian productions were represented in the festival program. Dance was live on stage. That says a lot, but more on that later.
Rasa
The root of Indian aesthetics lies in the concept of rasa, often translated as taste, but less in the sense of an artistic taste and more specifically in the sense of the senses of taste. The activation of the inner senses, which gives the sensory impressions a kind of quality. The outwardly directed senses see, touch or hear SOMETHING, focus on SOMETHING. The taste of sweet or sour is more of a quality of WHAT tastes sweet or sourit has the Feature to be sweet or sour. These qualities correspond to an inner sensual experience. This can be transmitted through the expressive power of theater, poetry, music and dance. In the Natya shastra there are the four basic principles of love/eroticism (Śṛngāram), heroism (Vīram), anger (Raudram) and disgust (Bībhatsam)). Someone loves, is a hero, is angry or disgusted. The whole thing becomes arbitrarily complex, the emotional characteristics differentiate themselves, colors and costumes are assigned to them and gods correspond to their powers, culminating in dance.
At this point, I just want to point out that at the core of this aesthetic, which is still the basis of traditional dance in India today, is the inner emotional state. This emotional state is embodied and manifests itself through the performers and evokes the same feeling in the viewer. This is the basis of aesthetic theory in India.
It goes against the tradition of European aesthetics since Plato, with its focus on representation. This retinal The idea that art takes place in the eye gave rise to central perspective, the camera and the cinematographer.
Moving pictures
So what happens when the camera's eye focuses on the dancers? How is a dancer's expression transferred to the screen? What new narrative forms are opened up by editing and montage? In his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility", Walter Benjamin saw the loss of aura through new media such as radio and film as by no means only negative. Editing and montage freed 'performing' artists from the constraints of a theater space and made it possible to visualize what could otherwise only be evoked in the imagination. To me, this historical starting point seems promising when it comes to the question of a new genre of dance film. To a certain extent, the theater has been liberated by film; in the USA, for example, it has been almost completely replaced by movie theaters. Significantly, Broadway theaters, i.e. musicals, which retain dance as one of their central principles, bucked this trend. They are still popular today. The experience of dance theater as a live experience is highly valued in almost all cultures that have a stage culture. Even MTV's music videos have not been able to do much to change this.
What became visible in Manifest is not a new phenomenon. However, the focus of Manifest was deliberately directed towards the fusion of film art and theater. The decision to only allow films that consciously exploit the medium of film in its artistic expressiveness was strategically correct. In this way, something became concentrated and visible. Perhaps a new genre. It is something different from "Singing in the Rain" or Wim Wenders' documentary "Pina Bausch", nor is it Michel Jackson's MTV videos or Bollywood's "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge". You could say that the 40 films selected at the festival were short films that chose dance as their language. An international language without words, as Dziga Vertov called for, and a language that contrasts the core of moving images, namely the language of movement. While Bergson and Godard accuse the cinematographer of lying, and Deleuze identifies truth purely in the materialized form of thought in film, the dance film attempts the impossible, the squaring of the circle: the concentration of film on movement as language in 3-dimensional space. This restrictive focus is tantamount to a manifesto, just like the numerous art movements of the avant-garde.
Room and screen
The Incubator Lab's hybrid film experiments were exciting. Dance choreographies were realized in films and performed on stage. The main aim was to feel the difference as an audience. What is the same and what is different? What works and what doesn't? The productions were small-scale experiments that invited reflection.
The festival catalog is available here: https://auroapaar.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/MANIFEST-2023-CATALOG.pdf
It's worth a look, I really liked the movies on the following pages: 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 56
