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What is for you, briefly, dancefilm or cinema of dance?
Well I think that dancefilm os one thing and cinema of dance is another.
In the cinema of dance, we could put a lot of films that include in some way dance, from films in which dance is their main character in terms of script and the rest of characters are dancers or want to dance like Black Swan, Dirty Dancing, Fame, or documentaries like Pina to musicals where dance appears as an extraordinary thing, outside of the own script of the actors without do then any reference to the fact to have been dancing in the scene. How funny!
In contrast, in dancefilm we don't query if the characters are dancers but we get directly inside in the dance universe and the movement with emotion (be it a human who does the movement or an object, an animal or an animated being…)
I understand dancefilm as a commune with these two arts, cinema and dance, and the dialogue between both languages: the dance one that is abstract and poetic and the cinema one that is fragmented and virtual, and it gets out dance from its general frontal frame typical from the black box, even if today dance is ever more outside of the theatres.
I think that a dancefilm work has more capability to explode to the maximum through cinematographic language and resources, and bestow it on a narrative plus, a choreography that would be impossible in live.
In dancefilm, the story, the script and the choreography must generate in the same phase of creation, they have to develop in parallel, if not, we would be taking about choreographic pieces adaptated to the screen. I think this is what it makes that a work can be defined as a dancefilm, the author must imagine already that dance or choreography in images in movement, inside of a frame before its execution.
This definition I give you is totally subjective and from my own experience and understanding. There are still a lot of terms to complete and define about this “genre” and a lot to add: dancefilm, videodance, screendance, expanded dance, expanded cinema are terms that we confuse still and try to define a new type of art works that have dance as a core.
I think that at the end all is the same: an art work. But often, for a better understanding, specially for at critics, we have to categorise and classify.
Dance film is a concept that almost touched the border between two different artistic disciplines, and it is in the limit of what it is one genre or another where it is generated new forms that later will label as categories, genres, disciplines…