This article examines Film Studies of the Dance, a dance film created in 1935 by Blanche Evan, Lionel Berman, and David Wolff. The film premiered Evan's new system of dance training, Functional Technique, to the 1930s New York revolutionary dance community. I analyze the film and Functional Technique inside of the debates over technique and content that preoccupied left-wing modern dancers in this period. Ultimately, Film Studies of the Dance emerges as a collaborative attempt by Evan, Berman, and Wolff to create new approaches to dance and film that would unify form and content to further socially conscious art making.

The article examines the hybrid genre of screendance portraiture through the example of 52 Portraits by Jonathan Burrows and collaborators (2016). It unpacks three concepts that are foundational to visual art portraiture and suggests how each might apply to screendance portraits: the truth seeking impulse of portraiture; the portrait transaction, and the relationship between likeness, type and seriality. The article shows how 52 Portraits both relies on and departs from the productive counterpoints found within the portraiture tradition. In so doing, the article builds toward an emergent framework for understanding how screendance portraits function.

This article analyses Thierry De Mey's screendance One Flat Thing, reproduced based on William Forsythe's dance of the same name. The filmmaker creates a heightened atmosphere of otherworldliness by drawing on the choreographer's own conception of it: from romantic ballet and the technique of disfocus. In addition to filming Forsythe's main dance, the screendance includes five movement sequences that do not appear in the original choreography. Their interspersion into the filming of the main dance contributes strikingly to the alien landscape: (1) the architectural composition of the tables, (2) the dancers’ exaggerated, disjointed movements, (3) the filmic editing through juxtaposing cuts, and (4) the close-ups for intimacy and deterritorialization. By more prominently integrating Forsythe's deconstructive aesthetic, De Mey creates an enhanced otherworld through the medium of screendance that is not possible to achieve with live dance.