The schedule for Dances for all screens showcase includes 30 works created, almost in their entirety, under the effects of the pandemic. Against the backdrop of uncertain times, national and international artists create critical and poetic windows. They tread the field of invention from film to digital, passing through the vapt-vupt (high speed) of social networks, mobile devices, drones, and compact or professional cameras. Invited by the Biennial, the trio of curators, creators, and researchers – Isis Gasparini, Rodrigo Gontijo, and Vanessa Hassegawa – groups these works in four programs dedicated to body and soul states.

From the palm of the hand to the projection

It was in the palm. Yes, in the palm of the hand that good part of the program reached our eyes’ delight. The dances that will be watched over these days on different screens chosen by their viewers have in common the desire for dance. The impetus that has called us to this curatorship, to pull all-nighters being the audience for works that combined bodies, images choreographies, and audiovisual, forming an infinitude of narratives of dances for the screen1 which, somehow, mark their trajectories and of these artists that we have the pleasure of appreciating. 

Video Dance, Cinema, Screens. Since its first reunion, the curatorship started with reflections around these three words, which triggered certain considerations for extending the dance borders in its relationship with the images under motion. A subject that goes beyond the framing of a camera’s lens, whether video, film, or digital, and the ability to reorganize itself in algorithms. So we start with the desire to look into the action associated with the exhibit since the approximations between screens and dances are many, and the plural form with which the works have been both produced and shared should appear in this cutout as a fluid, friendly invitation to the audience.  

How to think about a set of works produced in a direct relationship with the screen, in a moment the screen itself started being the place of a possible existence against a changing world? These different forms of production, of a hybrid and changeable nature – which from time to time, reinvent themselves – invite us to reflect on the dematerialization of the relationships that inevitably touch us on the present. Each invited work was brought here by what it carries of unique in its action and on what it adds to this multiplicity of directions and possible actions.

The plural accompanying the Dance that reverberates in multiple Screens emerges as a language to cross over the different possibilities for appreciation, which vary, especially when the reunions expand themselves in the access to the screens, mobile devices, and also shared knowledge. 

By looking at the etymology of the word video, we understand it is the conjugation of the verb videre (see, in Latin), in the first person of the simple tense: I see. The video is an action, an act of looking, contemplating. Throughout the story, video was the name given to a technological device used to produce images performed in electronic systems. Here, our “act of looking” is not directly related to the capture device but the exhibition forms. 

The streaming technology, which allows access to on-demand movies on the Internet, allows the act of looking to be renewed in the present instant, in different exhibition supports. It allowed us to look at the works from the screen and think about them from the reception, even before the production means. Thus, we move forward with the reflection on a field that, today, we understand as saying more about the appreciation than a technical specificity at the moment of the performance. 

We also imagine that the works can be appreciated by a broad audience and, expect, beyond the more consolidated dance circuit. The multiple screens, which refer both to the different ways of doing and those of appreciation, reach the audience in the palm of their hand, in a monitor, or maybe in a projection.

The exercise of grouping a set of audiovisual works that have the dance as the common thread is a task both challenging and inexhaustible. The exhibit presents movements of bodies from varied Brazils, which transmute the interaction with the screens to the extent the supports and devices are modified. We gathered here works born from different materialities, from the film to the digital, movies, “fast dances,” like the ones from social media platforms like TikTok, Reels in Instagram, and going through mobile devices drones, compact or professional cameras, among others. 

The Danças para Todas as Telas [Dances for All the Screens] were produced not only by artists from different country regions but also from different circuits, varied generations, and points in the career. Far from depleting the multiplicity that this reunion dance-image is capable of producing, it is interesting for us here to think about the power of the reunion between the universes of Dance with the Screens, which assumes, in current times, an even stronger and irreversible presence, reuniting works that we often consider timeless.

We decided to organize the works within the following Programs: “Estados de Invenção” [States of Invention], “Solitude e Recolhimento”[Solitude and Retreat], “Memórias, Corpos e Afetos” [Memories, Bodies, and Affection], and “Fluxos, Modulações e Deslocamentos”[Flows, Modulations, and Displacements]. By watching each of them separately, the spectator will be able to experience its singularities and come closer to each artist’s universe. And, going through the sequences proposed for these programs, they can participate in the dialog that we establish with them, sharing the poetic connections suggested by the curatorship. And, one way or the other, they may find their own paths, punctuating other approximations among the works.

And it is under this imponderable effect that here, bodies show what do their people have of them, what do their souls have of their people, what do their souls have in that slang-step-dance that tells the world the eagerness of BEING dance until the screens are shattered from so much desire to dance.  

And from this desire, and under this inspiration, we invite them all to join in these dances. Have a great session!  

By Isis Gasparini, Rodrigo Gontijo and Vanessa Hassegawa

CURATORS’ MINIBIO

Isis Gasparini is an artist and researcher working in the field of Dance and Visual Arts. She investigates body, image, choreography and exhibition spaces. She holds a master’s degree in Visual Poetics from ECA-USP, a degree in Fine Arts and is a specialist in Photography. She is a dancer with performance in independent companies.

Rodrigo Gontijo is an artist, researcher, curator and professor at the State University of Maringá. He works in the fields of experimental and expanded cinema, dances for screens, essay-film, live cinema, audiovisual performances, and exhibition cinema.

Vanessa Hassegawa is a dance researcher born in the Amazon region of the State of Pará, curator, artist in the field of video dance|dance for the screens and an acting public relations practitioner. She is a Master’s student in Performing Arts at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), where she is researching the media “of the palm of our hand”.