After searching through many screendance videos on YouTube, Vimeo and excerpts from Festival submissions, I concluded that the majority of screendance that I found included at least two of the following:
beautiful women, beautiful women with long flowing hair, ditto in white dresses, close-ups of grass, close-ups of feet, beautiful natural landscapes or extreme industrial locations, cows, water/lakes/seas, bare legs or arms or both
OR
women's bodies hidden in nature, such as in Element by Amy Greenfield, and Husk by Eiko + Komo
AND
lots of emotional dancing or sensuously sensing.
I assume my strategies of online research are limited, and/or there is a lot of potential in this generation to expand on the notions of dance and screendance. I did find a Screendance Lab done by Kirstie Simpson and Katrin McPherson that used Contact Improvisation as its form of dance, and explored interesting angles of filming to catch spontaneous moments. However, these dancers were also letting their flowing long hair accentuate their sensuous experiences, which creates, I find, a romanticised dance aesthetic and an objectifying gaze of the viewer.
This thought is reflected in Chapter 2 of Bolton's, "The Camera is an Irigarayan Speculum" in which the exteriority of women, whether clothing or skin, highlights the superficial level at which women are observed; these being aesthetically pleasing allow the watcher to stay within this objectification, often unacknowledged.
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