Grounded

In this article, Claudia Kappenberg (University of Brighton, UK) and Fiontán Moran (Tate Modern, UK) reflect on the curation of a one-off online Screendance festival which they co-devised in summer 2020. Kappenberg had secured financial support from a Covid Recovery Fund set up by the University of Brighton with the aim of initiating regional recovery projects from any academic discipline or field of research. Due to a nationwide lockdown all art institutions along the East Sussex Coast had been closed, which caused an eery absence in the region of creative critical discourses. Kappenberg invited Fiontán Moran, a visual arts curator with an interest in the body on screen but new to the canon of Screendance, to collaborate with her on the festival. The festival consisted of five programmes, each available online for 24hrs and it concluded with an online conversation. This article takes the form of a dialogue between the two curators. They reflect on the festival’s title ‘grounded’ and the use of Screendance as a lens with which to explore films from diverse groups of artists and epochs, and propose thinking about movement as a political act

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Politics · The arts · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Music History and Culture · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism