Keeping in time: Mastery, as a condition of colonial and patriarchal discourse, and the temporality of screendance

This chapter acknowledges the complex lure of mastery, as an operation of colonial and patriarchal discourse, within screendance practice and explores some ways of resisting it. With reference to Julietta Singh’s text Unthinking Mastery (2018), it focuses on the quality of timelessness that mastery generates, a sense that things are unchangeable. The discussion starts from the premise that screendance has the capacity to generate an affective sense of the body as mutable, temporally situated, and with the potential for change, qualities that offer a resistance to narratives of mastery. This is explored through a spectator and practice-led discussion of three screendance works that use similar low fi methods to intensify an affective sense of the body moving in and through time: Terrance Houle’s Friend or Foe series (2010– 2015), Concha Vidal’s Diving into your absence (2014) and I made everything, created by the author, Dr. Anna Macdonald, in 2019.