For Karel Doing's Meni (1992–94)

There is an exacerbated form of scenography, of intense questioning of time and space through the body: dance. In choreography, bodies make the spatial relations amongst phenomena explicit and their trajectories intensify them. Dominique Païni has referred to the “choreographic fatality of cinematic invention”—in extreme cases, with dance, a character is its place and the body is the only place. How can two kinds of movement be confronted— that of movies and that of dance? What kinds of figures do these encounters produce? To what degree does dance shed light on cinema?

Several statements and preliminary observations are required. First, reflections on cinema have taken very little account of the extraordinary culture of movement dance has developed. One could even say these reflections have ignored dance to the point of exercising a kind of permanent hold-up on the question of movement—as witnessed, for example, by the title of the wonderful catalogue published by the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s film department: L’art du movement (The Art of Movement). Suggestive and appropriate as this title may be, it also seems singularly imperialist: “the art of movement” is also, first and foremost, a definition of dance itself. On the contrary, it is necessary to bring a bit of choreographic culture back into cinema, to consider how dance flourishes and blossoms in films, how it informs and even structures cinema—especially if the cinema does not want to know about it.

We will much more easily discern dance's deep inf luence on cinema if we avoid their typical disciplinary crossovers, that is, dance's three standardized uses in movies: filmed dance performances, musical comedy and ethnological recordings. It is therefore necessary to describe a field that has not yet been established: non-scientific instances of dance on film. Balls, surprise parties, celebrations, games and excitement expressed in dance: all opportunities to show non-skilled dancing when it is not yet an art, but still an exercise, not a repertoire but a bodily practice— while, symmetrically, cinema does not serve and is not ruled by dance the way musical comedies and ethnographic films tend to be.