For me, LURU did not begin with the idea of creating another festival. It grew out of a practice that has, for many years, existed between choreography, cinema and the moving image. For me, the question was never simply how to film dance. It was what happens to choreography when the camera, the editing, the frame and sound become part of the choreographic process itself ? Screendance has always occupied an interesting position between disciplines. It belongs to dance, but not entirely. It belongs to cinema, but not quite. The camera changes our understanding of space; editing changes our understanding of time; framing, sound, rhythm and movement begin to operate together as parts of a choreographic language. What I felt was missing in Bengaluru was not necessarily more dance films or another film festival, but a context in which this form could be encountered and discussed on its own terms. There are already artistes in India making interesting work in this area, but the conversations around screendance remain quite dispersed. Much of the international work being made is also difficult to encounter unless one actively follows the festival circuit. LURU comes from a desire to bring some of these threads together, to place Indian artistes in conversation with international work, to give audiences and students an opportunity to encounter the form and to begin building a community around it.

The primary thing we looked for was whether the film was genuinely thinking through movement and cinema together. A film could have extraordinary dancing in it and still not necessarily be screendance. For me, the interesting question was whether the camera, editing, framing, sound, space and choreography were participating in the same artistic language. We were interested in different approaches rather than a single definition of what screendance should be. Some films are highly choreographic, some are narrative, some are experimental, some sit very close to cinema and others emerge more clearly from dance practice. What mattered was that the movement was not simply an object being filmed. The moving image itself had to become part of the choreographic thinking.

My own engagement with the international screendance community has partly come through festivals such as Choreoscope. Once you begin encountering this work internationally, you realise how much of a larger ecosystem exists around screendance: festivals, artistes, programmers, filmmakers, educators and audiences. Choreoscope has been an important platform for dance film internationally and the collaboration felt like a natural extension of what LURU is trying to do: connect Bengaluru with the wider screendance ecosystem rather than build the festival in isolation. The September 19 screening is deliberately intimate. Rather than treating it simply as another screening, we wanted it to become an encounter between the international work represented by Choreoscope and artistes and filmmakers connected to LURU. When we watch a finished film, we encounter a very controlled final object. We don’t necessarily see the questions, experiments, failures and decisions that produced it. For me, screendance becomes particularly interesting when we begin to understand how the choreographic decision and the cinematic decision influence one another.

I don’t think they need to leave with a definition of screendance. I’d rather they leave with the feeling that they have encountered a different way of thinking about both dance and cinema. Perhaps they begin to notice that the camera itself can choreograph. That a cut can have rhythm. That framing can change the meaning of a gesture. That the absence of a body can be as choreographic as its presence. And perhaps they leave asking a slightly bigger question: what becomes possible when the body and the camera begin to choreograph together?

On until September 19. At Hennur.

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