Going nowhere: Screendance and the act of dying

Recent literature concerning the temporality of film deals extensively with concepts of movement, stillness, and what Røssaak refers to as “a turn to the in-between” (orig. emphasis) (2011:14). This discourse focuses predominantly on the apparatus of film and, at times, lacks engagement with the felt sense of movement and stillness in the lived body, the embodied temporality, of both viewer and performer. Through an analysis of the relationship between movement, time and progression within both the screendance body and the dying body, this article addresses this lack by generating insights, drawn from embodied research, that enrich stillness and motion studies. The article’s distinctive, performative and intermodal framework, allows the concrete specificity of the author’s ‘insider knowledge’ (Nelson, 2013:37), of an embodied felt sense (after Gendlin) of the lived time before loss, to impact upon temporal concepts from screendance, film and palliative care discourse. The research involves a detailed analysis of the way static shots, embodied movement, linear sequences and the aesthetic of balance can generate a sense of movement and stillness. These methods lead to findings that propose an inward movement of time – within the dying body that brings the past and future into present and the incorporation of time within the dancing body, which are offered as a challenge to the outward and endless flow of time in Deleuze interstices (1989), and Bergson’s durée (1911). The article’s analysis of concrete choreographic findings, concerning the temporal affect of loss, work to nuance conceptual discourse on this area from writers such as Mulvey, Doane and Kappenberg, and make an important contribution to understanding of temporal affect of screendance. The research adds to wider understandings of the role art plays in helping us live with our mortality, and has significant transferable application in the fields of both grief and palliative care studies.