Art in Motion: Current Research in Screendance edited by Franck Boulégue and Marisa C. Hayes, Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Art in Motion brings together a collection of diverse papers from The Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne’s first International Screendance Conference, held in April 2013 with additional contributions from affiliated lectures and the festival’s Screendance Studies blog. It is inevitable that published conference proceedings contain some papers that are of a higher standard than others, and to some, published proceedings may seem counter productive, traditionally seen as research in progress, or re-workings of papers in other forms. A counterview is that proceedings allow wider audiences access to new research, which would otherwise remain invisible. Art in Motion is a bilingual English/French edition, with every essay published in both languages, which especially affords French scholars the opportunity to share their research with a wider audience while also reflecting on the role screendance scholarship plays in France. The conference co-directors and book editors, Franck Boulégue and Marisa C. Hayes, acknowledge that while the term “screendance” is commonly used in academia, an alternative concept of Art in Motion suggests a more “inclusive” approach, one which examines movement created specifically for screen in many different forms, diverse dance styles, somatic practices, choreography of everyday gestures, and avant-garde film.1 They also defend the variety of other terms used within Art in Motion as a necessary compromise in line with each scholar’s specific rationale for their chosen terminology, which reveals conceptual, rather than medium-specific approaches.