Carriageworks, Sydney: 24 Frames per Second

Filmed dance puts the viewer right up close but lacks the intimacy of being with real bodies in a shared space.

24 Frames, Carriageworks

When a play is turned into a film it is usually fundamentally reworked, even if certain structural features — such as a restricted cast, a limited number of mostly indoor settings, and a recognisable narrative shape — betray its origin as a stage production. Direct documentary recordings of performances can be fascinating as historical records, but can only ever convey a very feeble impression of the theatrical experience.

The reason for this is partly technical, related to the way stage and screen address the eye. In a theatre, the audience sees the whole stage, but the eye moves from point to point with entrances or exits and as the dramatic relationships between the actors evolve. The eye can zoom in on a detail or open out to comprehend the full expanse of the stage.

In a filmed version of a stage production, however, it is much harder for the viewer to travel around and in and out of the stage space. The director has the option of filming everything in a long shot, which flattens the whole stage on to the screen, or of emulating our selective attention by moving from side to side, or zooming in for a close-up at a critical moment. But if the first option reduces the eye’s ability to travel around the stage space, the second takes away the viewer’s initiative and awareness of what is happening or not happening elsewhere in the performance space.

In another, more profound way, theatre and film engage their audiences very differently. The way we sit and watch is telling: in a theatre, the audience sits up straight, alert, even on the edge of their seats; in a cinema, people lounge back and stretch their legs out. One audience is preparing for an active experience that it expects to be intellectually and morally demanding, the other is preparing for a passive one that will overwhelm or submerge it as in a dream.

Filming dance involves all of these factors as well as some additional complications. The principle is akin to the contrast between painting and sculpture: we see a painting as an optical phenomenon, a pattern of forms and colours on a flat surface that simultaneously evokes some image of the phenomenal world. Sculpture, on the other hand, is experienced kinaesthetically and sympathetically; even without perceptible or conscious movement, we subtly echo the attitude of the sculpted figure in our own bodies.

Dance involves us in a similar way, for we respond, once again kinaesthetically and instinctively, to the movement of other bodies before us. Energy or lassitude, optimism or dejection are immediately conveyed by the action of the torso or the gestures of the limbs. Naturally the performance is more effective when we are closer to the dancers, because the physical communication is more direct. The advantage of film is that it can bring us very close to the dancing body, but the disadvantage is that it cancels the intimate relationship between real bodies in a shared space.

Of the dance-inspired video works in 24 Frames per Second at Carriageworks, the most successful is Angelica Mesiti’s film of a Nakh dance, in which three women from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco whirl their long dark hair around in a hypnotic and ecstatic rhythm; the combination of close-up view and slow motion is effective in conveying something of the experience we might have as viewers of the real dance, while at the same time translating that into a medium with its own aesthetic integrity. The ritual is a traditional Berber one, so it may well pre-date the Arab invasion and the imposition of Islam. The display of the women’s luxuriant hair is associated with sexuality and fecundity and the dance is performed by young unmarried women in front of young men. Today the subject is particularly interesting in the context of the widespread tendency to reimpose the wearing of headscarves even in Muslim countries that had emancipated themselves and their women from this custom in the 20th century.

In Algeria, there is currently a sinister social media campaign urging husbands to “be a man and cover your woman”, which has been countered by a video taken with a hidden camera and showing the shameful way that Algerian men proposition or abuse almost any woman, covered or not, who passes them in the street. In Egypt, a respected intellectual has caused huge controversy by declaring that it is time to abandon the headscarf once and for all, and in Iran there is a movement of young women posting selfies without headscarves as statements of liberation. Western feminists, meanwhile, have been cravenly silent on women under Islam.

In that sense, Mesiti’s video is also unobtrusively but deeply political. Other attempts at political messages are less successful, either because they are too overt or because the reference is too obscure. One work, for example, is meant to refer to climate change, but you would never know it without the help of the label; red lighting is not enough to make the context clear. At the other extreme, there is a dancer in a tank filling up with water, which refers to the plight of South Pacific islands that fear being submerged by rising sea levels. Here the meaning is too literally expressed and the result is bathos.

Another reason that Mesiti’s work is successful is that she conveys the joy and energy that are inseparable from dance in all cultures, but which are poorly represented in the exhibition as a whole.

As a product of the contemporary cultural establishment, there are plenty of grim and unhappy images, and naturally it is compulsory to include elderly, overweight and disabled performers; it wouldn’t do to suggest that dance was only for young and shapely bodies.

This could be taken as a compassionate view, except that it has to be seen within the broader and less appealing context of the contemporary culture industry, which I described recently as a system of moral credits, on the same principle as carbon trading. Carriageworks, for example, hosted international fashion week in April, and this lucrative orgy of skinny models and fake commercial beauty had to be paid for by an excess of moral correctness at the high art end of the cultural spectrum. A moral credit had indeed already been earned by a program of overweight dancers in January, so the catwalk investment was carefully hedged.

Joy and energy are curiously lacking even where they might have had an unimpeachable right to display themselves. Thus Lizzie Thomson’s work, we are told, “loosely tracks the history of jazz dance”, but surely the invention of this genre involved some passion, sensuality and even fun. Thomson’s performance is so po-faced and bloodless as to be unintentionally comical, and when I was there a group of young dancers burst out laughing and spontaneously began mimicking some of the moves, but with a natural youthful dynamism.

A couple of works attempt to suggest a connection with the natural environment, but with mixed success. Alison Currie is filmed half dancing and half climbing over massive rocks, worn smooth by millions of years of erosion, and the images are projected on to a three-dimensional surface. The performance demands physical energy but is lacking in any deeper feeling or meaning. Francois Chaignaud dances through an American desert landscape, singing Purcell in an elaborate headdress, half baroque, half shaman, but he does not convey any sense of a real involvement with his environment, and one can’t help thinking Priscilla did it all better.

More effective both in its understanding of the energy of dance and of the potential for engagement with nature is Daniel Crooks’s portrait of Don Asker, dancer and farmer, in a setting that evokes his rural life. Asker is seen standing in a river with trees and sky behind him, and then the scene begins to melt into the vortex of movement and flux that Crooks loves to evoke: within this blur of time and space, though, the last things to disappear are hands and arms, reaching out like images of the direction and intention that are the essence of dance.

Among other works that stand out is one inspired by Nijinsky’s descent into madness in which the editing prevents us from following the choreography in a coherent manner, but conveys the disjunction and distraction of his mind. Also striking is Saburo Teshigawara’s film of a young woman dancing on broken glass, projected in a boxlike space where she is seen on the far wall while a dark male figure moves threateningly on the sides.

The audience is thus implicated in a scene that is very Japanese in its sadomasochistic sensibility and its juxtaposition of tender flesh with cutting shards of glass, and which evokes fear and vulnerability without superficial moralising or political messaging. At the same time the unusual format of multi-screen projection surrounding the viewer attempts to deal with a question discussed earlier, emulating the way that the eye simultaneously focuses on details and embraces the whole stage.

Malaise is a common theme, but finding effective expression for the sense that things are not right or even that they are very wrong is far from common. The most interesting case is also one that reveals the problem in the clearest light. James Newitt lives in Portugal and his work, the label informs us, is supposed to express something about Portugal’s social and economic crisis.

Perhaps this is a natural reading of the work if you happen to be watching it in Portugal; but of course dance cannot say anything about the specific conditions or problems in one country. It can only express freedom or constraint, fluency or inhibition, strength or weakness, vitality or entropy. And it is all of these negative conditions that are evoked in Newitt’s choreography: dancers twist, strain, spasm and collapse in a grotesque demonstration of human existence reduced to a state of paralysis.

No doubt this is what life can feel like to many people living in contemporary society, especially in countries suffering from the stresses of globalisation that have not adapted to the ruthless demands of the new order. But just as individuals cannot afford to give in to despair and expect the miseries of their lives to be fixed by the government or anyone else, so art has to do more than simply dwell on the contemplation of paralysis.

Suffering in itself has no moral significance; it is our response to it that makes meaning. In the same way, art must affirm the struggle against entropy and unconsciousness: that is why the expression of beauty and energy in dance is not, as many of these artists may naively fear, a form of escapism but, rather, a powerful manifestation of human resistance.

24 Frames per Second

Carriageworks, Sydney, until August 2