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Erin Brannigan. Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xvi + 224 pp.
Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik. Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. xviii + 316 pp.
Two recently published books take a close look at a traditional art form in two nontraditional ways. Erin Brannigan's Dancefilm and Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik's Site Dance both investigate how dance can create new meaning in and through unconventional performance spaces.
In Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image, Erin Brannigan explores what emerges from the complex act of putting dance on film. Brannigan considers a variety of dances and choreographers to study what she calls "dancefilm," that is, a dance piece specifically created to be filmed and viewed on the screen and not performed live for an audience. This group of evidence includes silent films that highlight the connection between the moving body and the camera (featuring a special look at silent film actress Lillian Gish), avant-garde cinema by filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Jean Renoir, and film musicals.
One of the first moves Brannigan makes is to separate the dancefilm from the often-privileged "liveness" of dance. Live dance performances have a corporeal presence that some scholars consider more "authentic" and immediate than a recorded dance performance. For instance, Brannigan cites the introduction to Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power edited by Susan Leigh Foster and "Past Glories Recaptured" by Clement Crisp specifically to show a bias toward the live moment in dance; this notion can be seen in critical studies of other performing arts as well. Brannigan bypasses these assumptions about the performer/spectator relationship in order to break free of the sometimes limiting hierarchy of liveness over mediated dance. Embracing the mediated body instead of disparaging it allows the author to consider a cine-choreographic notion of the body to explore formal film elements, transfers of motion, and theories of affect upon...