The Dance Company Film

Abstract

©2022 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois public-facing dance media have been widely available for decades. Examples include the dance-heavy movie musicals of the 1930s–50s, competition and reality television shows like So You Think You Can Dance, and games like Dance Dance Revolution. All of these have been the subjects of inquiry for media scholars seeking to understand not only the kinds of meaning-making in which these artifacts engage, but also how dance is involved in the process.1 However, both the general public and media scholars are less familiar with media created by and for “the dance world” itself. These are normally documentary-style moving-image media consisting primarily of rehearsal or performance footage, originally created for a range of utilitarian purposes: to learn and teach choreography, to evaluate performance quality, to keep an archive of finalized dance works. Indeed, video has become a crucial tool for dancers, largely replacing written notation as a means for preserving choreography. Many dance documentation films are ephemeral—they are recorded over, deleted, discarded, or otherwise lost after their immediate utility fades. However, in some cases they are collected, preserved, and thus available for analysis. In what follows, I conduct a foray into the largely untouched and unstudied archives of such moving-image dance recordings. They have slipped through the cracks of film and media studies because they are not well known outside of the dance world; meanwhile, most dance scholars have evaluated them primarily in terms of their effectiveness as faithful records of performance events or as notations intended for restaging.2 What has therefore been overlooked in the surface-level treatment of dance documentation films is the potential for them to reveal something about their creators and the institutions they represent. Indeed, I would like to suggest that while these recordings ostensibly serve a documentary or notation-like purpose, they are perhaps even more fruitful objects of study when considered as vehicles for (re)producing professional dance institutions and practices, as dance company films. I define the dance company film as a moving-image recording that is produced specifically by or for a dance company. Thus, I wish to locate the dance company film among an array of related nontheatrical film practices: it has a great deal in common with several types of what Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson call “useful cinema,” such as industrial film and educational film, but it also resembles documentary film and sometimes even home movies in its rhetorics.3 While each of these cinematic modes is discrete, in my discussion of dance company film, I demonstrate how each is present to varying degrees in this hybrid form. I argue that dance company film, like the rest of useful cinema, “has as much to do with the maintenance and longevity of institutions seemingly unrelated to cinema as it does pamela krayenbuhl is an assistant professor of film and media studies at University of Washington Tacoma. The Dance Company Film