Output details

Edits film (Screendance) Left Wing Mirror (Screen based installation)

Marisa Zanotti

Edits

This portfolio develops Zanotti’s previous research (PSW, 2012) with adaptation and documentation in screendance addressing how artefacts offer a methodology for reading live performance. The outcomes, Edits Film (2013, screendance) and Left Wing Mirror (2013, screenbased installation), are a response to an original choreographic work, Edits (2007) by Lea Anderson and The Featherstonehaughs.

Edits Film switches between the worlds of performance, rehearsal, and scenes written for company dresser Jaycloth, all parallel narratives that consider a familiar trope of Anderson’s work. Left Wing Mirror playfully strategizes visual exchange and the language and gaze of the big screen, in particular developing strategies for the use of the close-up in a performative installation.

The research explored how a screen narrative could be driven by poetic associations rather than by the horizontal progression through time. While Anderson’s five-act structure of the choreography is observed, each of these sections in this single screen work employs a distinct strategy that emerges from identifying key signs in the text of the dance. These signs are: 1) seeing considered as gesture, 2) visual exchange in dance performance and cinema for exchange of power that inherent in gaze, 3) viral imagery created postproduction and 4) gender as unstable sign. The aim was to make visible moments that destabilise normative ideas of body and gender, and drag and androgyny so further queering Edits (2007) whose source was part of a cannon of queer film. The outcomes consider the notion of intertext for generating a screen work from a live work, itself generated by a screen work. The originality of the research lies in using the play between adaptation and documentation to consider the choreography through a vertical narrative.

Premiered at Dance Umbrella, London, 2013