Claudia Rosiny
My relationship to video dance and dancescreen has been long and intensive. I grew up in Cologne, where my love for dance and dance theatre was inspired by the performances of Pina Bausch. Towards the end of my degree programme in theatre, film, and television studies, I spent one semester as an exchange student in Amsterdam. It was there, during a seminar on theatre and the media, that I discovered the special subject 'dance and video'. From the very beginnings of the Grand Prix Vidéo Danse in 1988, I attended the event every year as a critical observer, and from 1990 I pursued the same course with dancescreen. My master's thesis at the University of Cologne was devoted to the transfer problems involved in presenting dance on television; to this end I analysed various television recordings of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre. Even at that time, I realised that recordings and adaptations of dance performances for television often gave the impression of being a poor compromise, inferior to live performances in the theatre, and I came to the conclusion that the logical consequence must be choreographies conceived directly for the medium of television.

In Switzerland, parallel to my work for the 'Berner Tanztage' dance festival, I found a professor at the University of Bern who was willing to act as supervisor for a doctor's thesis dealing with a special subject bridging two disciplines: video dance. Because of my contacts to and familiarity with dancescreen and the excellent video library in Vienna, I chose films entered in dancescreen in the years 1990-1994 as the basis of my video dance research. I selected 444 films, not limiting my choice to the category screen choreography, but deliberately using camera reworks as well, because it was especially in this category that the most interesting and balanced fusions of dance and video were to be found. The results of these statistical and aesthetic analyses of video dance and dancescreen have been available since 1997 and surely constitute only a beginning for further research.

Working on this thesis, it became very clear to me how important dancescreen is for the stimulation of this art form, even though many television channels still are unable to reserve much broadcasting time for dance and video dance. While most channels still tend to prefer more conservative types of audio-visual dance pieces, thanks to dancescreen a development towards creative forms has nevertheless taken place. The rise in quality is becoming obvious, not only in screen choreographies and camera reworks, but also in numerous documentaries. Through my work in programming dance films I can bear witness to the fact that the dancescreen catalogues have become an indispensable aid, as they list nearly all audio-visual dance pieces produced worldwide.
My relationship to video dance and dancescreen
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