Dancing for the Camera: Reflections on dancescreen

An interview with Christiane Hartter

For more than three decades, dancescreen has served as a barometer for how dance and film intersect, evolve, and challenge one another. To reflect on this journey, we sat down with Christiane Hartter, a scholar, curator, and one of the most consistent witnesses to the festival’s history. As a research associate at the German Dance Archive Cologne (Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln) within the SK Stiftung Kultur, and a long-time curator of dance film programmes, Hartter has attended every edition of dancescreen for over twenty years.

In this conversation, she shares her perspective on the festival’s early ambitions, shifting aesthetics, changing audience habits, and the broader international dance film landscape.

1. Do you recall your first encounter with dancescreen, and what it represented at the time?

My first encounter with dancescreen was in 1999, when I was working as a research associate responsible for the film collection at the German Dance Archive Cologne. That year, the SK Stiftung Kultur – which also houses the Archive – brought dancescreen’99 to Cologne, opening it up as a festival for a broad public.

Originally, the IMZ in Vienna had co-founded the Grand Prix International Vidéo-Danse together with UNESCO’s CID, but after only two editions in 1990, the IMZ went on to establish its own competition under the title Dance Screen, with a strong focus on the television distribution of dance video productions.

Cologne was an ideal host city in 1999. Birgit Hauska from the SK Stiftung Kultur’s video dance department had been presenting video dance programmes for years and had initiated the German Video Dance Award (1996–2004) to support choreography for the camera. For the first time, historical dance films produced in the 1960s for Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) were also shown to an interested expert audience, initiated and curated by Ulrike Boecking and Thomas Thorausch.

Beyond the international competition – spanning stage recordings, documentaries, filmic re-stagings and camera choreography – the festival offered an extensive accompanying programme: cinema screenings across the city, media installations, and a vibrant meeting place for guests from around the world. Broadcasters, production companies and artists came together at a moment marked by optimism and belief in camera choreography as a new art form.

At the same time, broadcasters such as NPS in the Netherlands, the BBC with Dance for Camera, Channel 4, 3sat and ARTE were actively searching for innovative ways of presenting dance on television. ARTE even dedicated a regular 25-minute time slot exclusively to dance. There was a strong sense of continuity with earlier television experiments from the late 1960s, particularly at WDR in Cologne, where choreography, music and film direction were already being fused into genuinely new formats.

2. How have dancescreen submissions evolved aesthetically and artistically over the years?

It is hard to answer this conclusively, as the development has not been linear and trends have come and gone. There were phases dominated by striking costumes (such as works by Régine Chopinot or Philippe Decouflé), dance in extraordinary architectural settings (Rosas danst Rosas, Vertigo Bird), or the translation of stage works into the language of film—so-called filmic reinterpretations—by artists such as Clara van Gool, Thierry De Mey, or David Hinton.

Outdoor locations – the sea, forests, mountains, urban spaces – have always been popular, reflecting the fact that film has no spatial limits in the way the stage does. Spatial shifts within a single movement are a defining feature of camera choreography. More recently, filming dance “in nature” has become particularly fashionable, a tendency reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic and enabled by lighter, more mobile camera technology.

Drones, for example, invite bird’s-eye perspectives, but their frequent and sometimes indiscriminate use does not automatically result in more innovative camera choreography. At the same time, affordable and mobile video technology, along with digital editing possibilities, has shifted authorship from filmmakers to dancers themselves. Today, it is common to promote stage productions through video clips or to edit stage recordings into short-form videos.

As genre boundaries blur, there is a risk of arbitrariness: movement becomes an end in itself, everything becomes a “dance film,” yet often remains at a decorative surface level. Public space, too, is frequently used merely as a backdrop in site-specific projects rather than as a space for social reflection. That said, in response to recent global crisis, more narrative approaches have re-emerged. Dance filmmakers are increasingly political, addressing ageing, war, environmental issues, and social conflict.

3. How have audiences’ ways of engaging with dance films changed?

For today’s audiences, choreographed images and dance on screen are entirely familiar. Platforms such as TikTok have made dance for the camera widely accessible and reproducible, and many dance artists actively work with these formats. While these experiments are necessarily limited by the short, smartphone-based format, they can be remarkably inventive.

I would welcome dancescreen opening up to this reality by introducing a category for short-form camera choreography.

4. What role has dancescreen played internationally?

Historically, dancescreen played a crucial role. It was once the largest international dance film festival and highly attractive to filmmakers as long as representatives of major broadcasters attended, offering visibility and professional connections.

As dance programming declined on public broadcasters, interest from production companies also dropped. High submission fees further reduced participation, especially when compared to cheaper alternatives. Today, most broadcasters show dance primarily online and may use festivals mainly as a filtering mechanism for content that performs well on streaming platforms.

At the same time, dancescreen’s early visibility helped spark the creation of numerous dance film festivals across Europe and Asia. Many still exist, but they tend to focus on local audiences, prioritising audience awards over professional exchange. Touring programmes have become more relevant than festival events, bringing camera choreography to regions where live performances are difficult to realise.

What is often missing, however, is a transparent selection process and a serious discussion of quality standards. Without that, festivals struggle to shape an international dance film landscape. dancescreen has always stood for expertise and standards – but its profile now needs renewed clarity and precision.

5. What has sustained dancescreen – and what lies ahead?

It has always been the dance filmmakers themselves who kept dancescreen alive. Camera choreography remains a niche art form, even though its techniques have migrated into music videos, advertising and feature films, where choreographers are increasingly in demand.

To be recognised as an independent genre, dedicated festivals remain essential. Given rising travel costs and growing environmental awareness, I can imagine dancescreen adopting hybrid or online formats, building on models developed during the pandemic.

Above all, dancescreen needs clearly defined quality standards, categories and criteria. It should operate as a curated festival that reflects how dance films are used and circulated, involving editors, distributors, streaming platforms, critics and curators from both dance and film.

Different formats should be evaluated separately: camera choreography, filmic re-stagings, stage recordings, documentaries, animation and social media formats. dancescreen should actively contribute to the urgently needed quality debate at the intersection of dance and film.

At its best, dancescreen is a platform for the exceptional and the avant-garde. Reclaiming that role, through a clear profile and a strong curatorial vision, is what will ensure its continued relevance.