Existing Examples and Emergent Theories

Early examples of screendance portraiture include Victoria Marks's choreo-portraits for screen from the 1990s, Mothers and Daughters (Reference Marks and Williams1994), and Men (Reference Marks and Williams1997), made with filmmaker Margaret Williams. Solo portraits occurring in series include Australian choreographer Sue Healey's Reference Healey2012 documentary film Virtuosi (Reference Healey2012) and the ongoing series On View (Reference Healey2015–2020), and Dutch portraitist Rineke Dijkstra's two video dance series, The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL (1996–1997) (Reference Dijkstra1996–1997) and The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK, 2009 (Reference Dijkstra2009), though the latter are in a somewhat different vein, being crafted by a visual artist rather than a choreographer.

Despite this trickle of instances, the genre of screendance portraiture remains little theorized. Existing analyses of “the personal” in solo dance provide important starting points. Although they do not focus on the specific visual considerations of dance for screen, Franz Anton Cramer (Reference Cramer2003) and Tamara Tomić-Vajagić (Reference Tomić-Vajagić2012; Reference Tomić-Vajagić2014) provide useful complementary analyses of ways in which the personal can inhere within solos choreographed by others. Cramer analyzes Christophe Winkler's work Lebenslang (Reference Winkler2002), made with Margaret Illman and Bettina Thiel. He shows that, for a consummate ballerina, movement is a way of life rather than an external identity assumed for performance, and as such, the biographical can become evident within movement if the choreographer is open to fostering it (2003, 80). Tomić-Vajagić analyzes dancers’ performances of plotless choreographies by Balanchine and Forsythe. She discusses the emergent feeling of performing “as oneself” in plotless leotard ballets, in which the absence of plot and the simplicity of costume contribute to feeling exposed but also free to be oneself onstage (Reference Tomić-Vajagić2012, 257). Additionally, she provides the important notion of “self/portrait effects,” which articulates how solo dances might contain the appearance of portraiture as a surface effect (Reference Tomić-Vajagić2014, 83). In Tomić-Vajagić's analysis, self-portraiture is an appearance or effect that can emerge and recede over the duration of a plotless solo dance.

The concept of self/portrait effects unpacks the ambiguities of authorship in instances in which self-imaging is presented as if from a third person perspective. That is, in solos within choreographed plotless dance works, we might have the impression that dancers present self-portraits of themselves, while at the same time performing the material as set by the choreographer. Tomić-Vajagić (Reference Tomić-Vajagić2014, 83) notes that in so-called abstract ballets such as Forsythe's the second detail (Reference Forsythe1991) there is an absence of plot that makes the performers come to the fore as bearers of the action rather than as characters. This concept stems from Mieke Bal's narrative theory, particularly her formulation of character effects (Reference Bal2000, 113–114). As narrative falls away, as in a documentary film or a plotless ballet, something else emerges in place of character; the image of the person is accentuated, creating the effect of a portrait. The person is on view rather than the role. Tomić-Vajagić applies this principle to the performance of solo dance, which she identifies as a site of ambiguous authorship. Performers perform themselves within, or despite, the insignia of the choreographer.

Hetty Blades (Reference Blades2017) builds on Tomić-Vajagić's notion of self/portrait effects, arguing that self-portraiture and portraiture are further imbricated within screendance solos. One could argue, and Tomić-Vajagić acknowledges, that there are self/portrait effects to be observed in any interpretation of a plotless solo dance, though the effects will be greater when the choreographer foregrounds the dancer's role in the decision-making. What is significant for me in Tomić-Vajagić's articulation of self/portrait effects is that it names two conditions conducive to portraiture appearing to emerge even when not intended: abstraction and duration. Her notion of self/portrait effects emerges from analyses of solos created for a dancer by a choreographer without specific portrait intentions. Fittingly, it is a notion that best suits those circumstances. That is, the notion of self/portrait effects is best applied to solos that are not necessarily portraits. It provides a heuristic device to apply to situations of solo dance in which portraiture can be discerned as surface effect or appearance. It does not provide a framework for understanding dance portraiture as a specific representational mode. By contrast, I am interested in situations in which portraiture is a structural fact of the work, that is, when a solo is made by a choreographer with or for a performer, and the solo is designated at the outset as being portraiture, as is the case in 52 Portraits.

Like many words, “portrait” has an everyday understanding and a disciplinary-specific understanding. In developing a framework for articulating how portraiture might function in the hybrid context of screendance, I use disciplinary-specific understandings provided by visual art history and theory in order to question some of the assumptions implicit in the everyday use of the word. It is not within the aims of this article to provide a comprehensive analysis of the portrait tradition within visual art. Instead, in order to understand why a dance portrait might be considered to convey the “truth” of a dancer, I outline portraiture's relationship to the real. It is a relationship that includes a portrait's reference to the encounter between artist and sitter that produced the portrait, an encounter exemplified in 52 Portraits. In order to understand how a portrait of an individual dancer might contribute or refer to its broader social context, I then outline the relationship between likeness and type and discuss what happens when screendance portraits accumulate in a series, a feature that is accentuated by the yearlong serial nature of 52 Portraits.

The Truth-Seeking Impulse of Portraiture

Art historian Richard Brilliant begins his study of portraiture in visual art with the claim that portraits are different from other art objects by virtue of the fact that a portrait's referent is both real and specific (Reference Brilliant1991, 7). That is, whereas other genres that represent people might be abstract or fictional, a portrait is by definition a portrait of someone who exists or has existed. Portraits exist as a category by virtue of the intended relationship to the human original. Portraits can provide a riveting momentary illusion of access to the “real person,” an illusion that then dissipates for Brilliant, leaving him contemplating the image once more. The rub between these two strands of experience—access to the real, and contemplation of the image—is what makes portraits compelling: “The oscillation between art object and human subject, represented so personally, is what gives portraits their extraordinary grasp on our imagination” (Brilliant Reference Brilliant1991, 7).

Examples come to mind that challenge Brilliant's claim: instances of mistaken identity in which a historical portrait was thought to be of one person but turns out to be of another; portraits that do not present a very like “likeness” of the subject; artworks that name themselves as portraits but do not contain an image of the person at all. The question arises of how close the relationship between the image and the real needs to be in order for an image to be a portrait. But such counter examples misunderstand the function of Brilliant's claim. His claim means that once a work is framed as a portrait, the concept of portraiture comes to bear on the artwork, such that we understand it to represent a person who exists or has existed, regardless of how oblique that representation is. Thus, it does not really matter if, for several generations, a portrait was considered to be of X person and later turns out to be of Y; the work's framing as portraiture meant that in beholding it, the viewer experienced the oscillation between the image and what they believed to be a real person “behind” it. Similarly, a cubist portrait might not be readily “like” the actual person it represents, but when it is understood to be a portrait, we seek in the image a point of access to the real person to whom it refers.

In addition to the intrinsic relationship between image and the real in portraiture, portraits also appear to refer to a moment of encounter between artist and subject that is understood as real. Portraiture scholar Shearer West notes that the encounter between the artist and the sitter is evoked in the resulting portrait (Reference West2004, 41). Traces of the process of producing a portrait remain in the final work and point to something outside the representation, namely the real-time encounter that produced it:

Combining Brilliant and West, I suggest that portraits function via an oscillation between the image, the real person, and the imagined real-time encounter between artist and sitter. The gaze of the viewer assimilates all three into a complex and hopefully compelling experience.

Another facet of a portrait's relationship to truth is the psychological view. Here, a good portrait will communicate something of the subject's inner psychological state or personality. While this might seem self-evident today, West reminds us that such a view “became common only after nineteenth-century romanticism fueled the idea of a personality cult” (Reference West2004, 29). Although the notion of the individual became solidified during romanticism, its origins are found much earlier. In this regard, portrait historian Joanna Woodall cites theories of physiognomy emerging from antiquity but expanding markedly in the 1700s (Reference Woodall1997, 6). Physiognomy attempted to establish correlations between physical appearance (the external) and personality or character (the internal), such that a person's inner life could be read through his or her features. This system for “reading” the inner lives of others could be used manipulatively by portraitists. For example, Edgar Degas used physiognomic principles in his sculptural portrait of the young dancer Marie van Goethem (1879–1881), altering her actual facial proportions to align her with criminal prototypes and ascribe a depraved inner life to the young girl, as discussed by art historian Anthea Callen (Reference Callen1995, 27).

However, the psychological view of portraiture could also be employed for less dark ends. Woodall notes that “a sense of the difference between an inner, abstract subjectivity and an objectivized, material body has been discerned in portrait practice from the seventeenth century” (Reference Woodall1997, 10). Indeed, the schism between inner experience and external appearance permeates Western conceptions of subjectivity and portraiture alike.Footnote ¹ Rembrandt's portraits are often cited in this regard, as singularly insightful representations of the sitter's inner subjectivity. Informal portraits of artists’ intimates were considered less subservient than commissioned formal portraits, and thus able to communicate the inner life of the subject in different ways. Such portraits “implied a lived intimacy between painter and sitter, imaginatively reproduced in the viewer's relationship to the painting” (Woodall Reference Woodall1997, 7). Such images convey not abstract qualities of mind but rather some kind of inner essence empathically brought out by the special abilities of the artist, as in van Gogh's portraits. Images produced in this vein are thought to convey something internal and unique to the subject, which the artist's skill can intuit and represent.

Much of contemporary portraiture contests easy relationships between the image and the real. Art philosopher Cynthia Freeland cites Cindy Sherman and Yasamasa Morimura as iconic postmodern examples whose portraits show a mutable, unstable subjectivity (Reference Freeland2010, 264). Similarly, the notion of a stable inner subjectivity lying behind external appearance has been extensively challenged across many fields of critical theory.Footnote ² As concepts of selfhood and identity change, portraiture changes with them, and can be regarded as a primary site for contesting and working through the complexities and contradictions of contemporary subjectivity. However, the legacy of the psychological view of portraiture, a legacy firmly entrenched by romanticism's cult of the individual, remains strong. The tendency to regard portraiture as revelatory of the truth of the person (either through likeness or insight or a combination of both) remains prevalent. This comes to bear on how screendance portraiture is conceived and received, and how solo dances in general might be received.

Portraiture's truth-seeking impulse persists, as a tacit but pervasive lens through which solo dance is experienced, for both performers and audiences. Solo dances are often read as portraits, in that the truth-seeking impulse comes into play when viewing a dancer alone, even if this is not intended by the choreographer or dancer. Solo dances can also come to be regarded as portraits when dances take on iconic status with the passage of time, and are seen to epitomize the dancer, as in Fokine's choreography for Anna Pavlova in The Swan (1905), Vaslav Nijinsky's L'Après-Midi d'un Faune (1912), Martha Graham's Lamentation (1930) or Trisha Brown's Watermotor (1978). Though these solos can be performed by others, when performed by the originator, they are seen to epitomize a personal kinesthetic and/or choreographic insignia such that we see “the person” as much as “the dance.” Some structural clarifications are useful here, to elucidate portraiture's relationship to various types of solo dance.

The genre of self-authored solos warrants consideration. Aside from potential relationships to the genres of portraiture and self-portraiture respectively, there are other differences between solos choreographed for dancers, and self-authored solos. In their editorial for an edition of The International Journal of Screendance dedicated to solo performance, Harmony Bench and Simon Ellis (Reference Bench and Ellis2017) concur with the established view that in the twentieth century it was self-authored solos that were formative in the development of modern dance, rather than solo variations created by choreographers for dancers. When self-authored, “solo performance is fundamentally an expression of self rather than an interpretation of a role” (Bench and Ellis Reference Bench and Ellis2017, 2). However, dances that are “expressions of self” may contain self/portrait effects without the full mechanism of portraiture. Self-authored solos may contain the appearance of portraiture as surface effect but are not always portraits.

In her edited volume On Stage Alone, Claudia Gitelman argues that solo dances from the early twentieth century onward, such as iconic early solos by Loïs Fuller and Isadora Duncan, epitomized modernism and were influential in defining what a modern individual could be (Gitelman and Palfy Reference Gitelman and Palfy2012, 2). Individualism is a hallmark of modernity, and the self-authored solo fitted well into modernism's ideology of trailblazing individual artists. Also in On Stage Alone, in her analysis of the works of Maud Allan, Julie Malnig (Reference Malnig, Gitelman and Palfy2012) shows how Allan presented a series of femininities to her audience in her self-authored solo dances, from the exotic and sexually liberated to the ethereal. Crucially, she shows how Allan's solos were also at times a reading of the pulse, propelled by savvy careerism and careful curating of audience reception (125). Similarly, Deborah Jowitt describes the solos of Daniel Nagrin, showing them to be a series about men, which shaped the reception of masculinity on stage at the time (Reference Jowitt, Gitelman and Palfy2012, 173). His self-authored solos over the years showed a progression of masculine types or character studies.

I refer to these descriptions of Allan's and Nagrin's self-authored solos as presentations of feminine and masculine types to suggest that self-authored solos often do many other things as well as or instead of expressing the self. They may be read as self-expression, and self-portraiture may be ascribed to them because they are performed alone, but it is possible that this is because we view solo performances through the lens of individualism. The inherited truth-seeking impulse of portraiture outlined above may be such that when we witness a dancer alone, we infer a real person to whom the solo must refer, and we infer that that person is in front of us. My interest is not in tackling or debunking this tacit predisposition toward truth-seeking in solo dance. Rather, I ask: Given that it persists, where and how is it to be found at work in screendance portraits?

In the choreographic structure of 52 Portraits, Burrows includes fragments of personal statements drawn from interviews with the performers. These fragments seem at times to proffer access to the person “behind” the portrait, but the text fragments are abstracted and frequently rub against the impressions gleaned from the movement, confounding the viewer's desire to gain access to the real, in this case the dancers themselves. Choreographer Daniel Linehan's portrait is a case in point.Footnote ³ The camera's point of view is low to the table and slightly closer to Linehan than many of the other portraits, providing a sense of immediacy or contact. On commencing, completing, and at points during the portrait, Linehan looks directly but gently down the lens, as if to say, “Yes, it's a performance, but I won't make a big deal of it if you won't.” At the same time, the soft rhythmic precision of his gestures prevents the event from becoming merely casual. His gentle attitude of complicity toward the camera seems to incorporate the viewer as an essential part of the portrait event. However, the candor of his performance approach, and the relational flow it sets up between solo performer and the (likely) solo viewer receiving the emailed portrait on a laptop, are countered by the textual component. Unlike many of the fifty-two portraits that contain anecdotes from the performers’ lives, Linehan speaks an enigmatic poetic text, deflecting attention from the untrammeled contact his dance seems to offer, complicating our access to the “real person” to whom the portrait necessarily refers.

In a somewhat inverse negotiation with the portrait event, choreographer William Forsythe obscures his face, but the text accompanying his movement is replete with anecdotal candor.Footnote ⁴ Alongside comments about dance that have the gravitas one might expect from such a senior figure, such as that “dance may be the solution to a problem that was never a problem in the first place,” we hear that “Bill” often talks to people about his garden, and “apologizes to plants for doing certain things like ripping stuff out” (Burrows, Fargion, and Glendinning Reference Burrows, Fargion and Glendinning2016). The informality of the text and its reference to a personal life outside dance seem to point the audience to a self behind the portrait. But such access is complicated by the fact that Forsythe wears a hooded jacket and a mask. The visual focus becomes the dance of his forearms and hands, and the viewer is forced to make links between hand gestures and lyrics, bypassing the face as a signifier. Forsythe's choice to wear a mask for a choreographic portrait is intriguing and could be interpreted in various ways: as a rebuttal of portraiture's long tradition of reading faces as a window to the self, instead offering gesture as dance's “window;” as a means of deflecting the viewer's desire to see and gain access to a famous person; or even more broadly as a way to comment on the political uses of facial recognition and the desire for anonymous activism. Whatever the motivation for using a mask, Forsythe's portrait is an accentuated example of how the portraits in Burrows's project simultaneously offer and complicate access to the real people to whom they refer.

Burrows states that his selection of performers for the project is based on loving their work, thus the portraits are not made from a position of “knowing” the sitters/subjects (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 34). Neither is the inclusion of personal text fragments aimed at facilitating self-telling on the part of the dancer. Indeed, Burrows states that, in general, the autobiographical impulse is to be resisted: “The job of the dancer or performer is usually to resist the autobiographical impulse at all costs, because to embrace it is to reduce other rich and contradictory elements like more abstract or formal things, and then you risk losing some of the peculiarities and uncertainties which make performance resonate” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 23). It would seem that for Burrows, resisting the autobiographical impulse does not erase it; the specter of self-revelation persists. The tacit predisposition toward truth-seeking that accompanies solo dance is considered a tendency that needs to be actively countered. As quoted earlier, Burrows proceeds from an acknowledgement that even when dance is at its most abstract or distanced, “there is always a sense of the person revealed” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 23). Burrows's acknowledgement of the persistence of the truth-seeking impulse and his concurrent subversion of it is a productive counterpoint that propels the individual portraits in the series.

In solo dance, the “sense of a person revealed” can be traced not only to the truth-seeking imperative within portraiture but also to modern dance's rhetoric of the dancing body as a repository of truth that exceeds conscious awareness, epitomized in Martha Graham's maxim that “movement never lies” (Foulkes Reference Foulkes2002, 30). Burrows counters such an essentialism in 52 Portraits, noting, “It's not about truth or not, it's much messier than that, because that's how the body is” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 31). In the individual portraits in the series, we may search for access to the real person to whom the dance refers, at the same time that Burrows's various framing devices limit our access. But a portrait's reference to a real person is only one facet of portraiture's relationship to the real. A second facet is the way a portrait refers us to an imagined real-time encounter between choreographer and dancer, an encounter that is conceptually and materially foregrounded in 52 Portraits.

The Portrait Transaction

Freeland proposes a definition of portraiture that is useful when considering what aspects of selfhood might be used by performers and choreographers and made available to an audience in dance portraiture. Her detailed formulation of the portrait transaction helps reframe the thorny issue of truth through a model of mutually derived representation. Freeland begins from the familiar principles that a portrait represents a particular living being and shows physical resemblance and some aspect of the being's inner life (Reference Freeland2010, 5). But for Freeland, the criteria of physical recognizability and referral to an inner life are not sufficient for an image to be considered a portrait. She considers that “both the artist and subject of a portrait must participate knowingly in its creation, so that the resulting image can manifest their differing desires and attitudes about it” (Reference Freeland2010, 17).

Accordingly, an image would not be considered a portrait if it were taken unawares. From this we can extrapolate that a solo dance that has not been framed from the outset as an act of portraiture might not be considered a dance portrait. For Freeland, portraiture implies consent. While the stipulation for consent might seem to be splitting hairs, it is fruitful for clarifying what is at stake when crafting a portrait with a dancer. What consent enables is conscious—rather than tacit—participation in the framing of oneself for others:

The notion of “posing” brings with it a raft of assumptions regarding the relationship between inner experience and outer representation, inviting interpretations of falsity. In her essay accompanying Christine de Smedts's live work 4 Choreographic Portraits (2012), Ana Vujanovic analyzes the dialectic of public and private selves emerging from the organization of bourgeois society in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on Richard Sennet's The Fall of Public Man from 1974, Vujanovic describes how subjectivity is dichotomized into the public sphere of artificial social roles and the private domain in which we are free to be ourselves (Reference Vujanovic, Smedt, Ulens, Ball and Bogaert2012). Vujanovic notes: “In this sort of interpretation, it stands to reason that the authentic, private person needs to wear a costume or a mask to go public, and that public social performances are exactly what depersonalize us” (Reference Vujanovic, Smedt, Ulens, Ball and Bogaert2012, 38).

In this interpretation, the mask we wear in order to enable social interaction has an inferior truth status to the inner self. This could potentially lend an inauthenticity to the pose adopted by the sitter in the portrait transaction, and one might see that pose as an impediment to the artist's task of revealing the inner life of the sitter. As Freeland notes, Brilliant's discussion of the adoption of masks or poses in portraiture is in line with, or even exceeds this position, positing further that the masking or self-effacement within the representation of the self in portraits is consistent with the self-effacement and masking necessary to social life (Reference Freeland2010, 101).

Freeland herself offers a less negative assessment of the act of posing for one's portrait. Another way of describing posing is that the person being portrayed must “look back” at the artist. In the act of looking back, the subject is consenting to being viewed (Reference Freeland2010, 21). “Looking back” does not imply looking in a particular direction, as in looking “down the lens” in a photographic portrait. Rather, it more broadly implies agency on the part of the sitter in the formation of the image. For Freeland, self-presentation is a fact, born of the fact that humans are relational beings. We must present a relatively coherent self to the world in order to enable relationships with others: “Humans have a self that is relational, and that by its very nature involves self-presentation to others, with an awareness and concern about how one is seen, and this is part of what is rendered when an artist creates a portrait” (Freeland Reference Freeland2010, 104).

Freeland's discussion of the interpersonal transaction of portraiture emphasizes that the sitter contributes a self-representation that the artist must meet and absorb into the image. West's discussion of the interpersonal transaction of portraiture emphasizes the subtle mechanisms of power that condition how the artist might do this. As mentioned above, West describes how the material conditions of the portrait transaction are present in the portrait—the portrait refers not only to an actual person, but to an actual situation in which the sitter and portraitist encountered one another in the subtle negotiations of joint representation. The portrait transaction is therefore not only a prior condition that enables portraiture but also a real-time situation leaving traces to be discerned within the image.

If it is important that the sitter agrees to be portrayed in order for a portrait to ensue, as Freeland suggests, the question arises of whether it is important for the viewer or audience to know that a work is considered a portrait in order for it to function as portraiture. Calling to mind Brilliant's strong claim mentioned above—that the concept of portraiture comes to bear on the artwork, prompting the viewer to seek the real person to whom the image refers—then it would seem that yes, the viewer also needs to be party to the transaction of portraiture in order for it to fully function. In visual artworks that lie unambiguously within the tradition of portraiture, such as a Van Eyck or Holbein, it is clear that the work is intended as portraiture. However, in the field of dance, solo dances abound but not all are necessarily portraits, as evidenced in my discussion of self-authored solos. This ambiguity is instructive for considering when a solo dance can be considered a portrait.

In dance, the audience needs to know that he or she is witnessing a portrait in order for the full effects of portraiture to swing into action. In discussing her shift from making dances to explicitly making dance portraits, choreographer Victoria Marks notes,

In her experience, knowledge that a portrait is in action in the dance makes it read differently. In 52 Portraits, independent dancer Alexandrina Hemsley utilizes the power of performing a real-life relationship within her portrait event.Footnote ⁵ She brings her father with her, and father and daughter perform a portrait duet together. Their shared gestures have a playful, conversational air, with fingers dancing over a patterned tablecloth, and informal glances and smiles between them. As the text reveals their real-life relationship, their movements refer us to an imagined domestic situation preceding the portrait event, perhaps a rehearsal at the kitchen table. Taking the initiative to bring an outside relationship into the portrait transaction shows a particular style of agency regarding the formation of one's image within the bounds of Burrows's framing.

In her discussion of 52 Portraits, Hetty Blades comments on the ambiguity of authorship present in the dances, the lyrics, and the relationship to the camera (Reference Blades2017, 96–97). Building on Tomić-Vajagić's notion of self/portrait effects, Blades describes how the screen amplifies the blending of first and third person perspectives. She suggests that 52 Portraits creates a liminal space between perspectives and characterizes the performers’ perspective as an inner one that contrasts with the external perspective of Burrows and collaborators (2017, 97). As discussed above in relation to the psychological view of portraiture, the perception that the portraitist (or choreographer) has the task of externalizing the inner life of the sitter (or performer) is an entrenched notion within portraiture, despite multiple challenges to the dualistic philosophy that underpins such a perspective.

Counter to Blades's upholding of the separation between internal and external perspectives in 52 Portraits, I propose that dance portraiture in general, and 52 Portraits in particular, provide interesting tropes for challenging this very binary, for reasons particular to the training of dancers. When working with professional performers, as in Burrows's project, one can assume a level of training and experience that enables oscillation between inner and outer perspectives of oneself while performing. Simultaneously holding onto the “feeling” and the “framing” is a practiced skill in the professional dancer. As Burrows notes, he enjoyed witnessing the skill of the dancers, who “pitch their performance with self-conscious awareness in relation to the camera and the viewer” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 25). The dances thus already contain considerable third person perspective, prior to any additional framing by Burrows.

Annie Hanauer, one of the dancers in 52 Portraits, is well practiced at dancing while negotiating how she might be perceived.Footnote ⁶ Hanauer began her dancing career with Candoco Dance Company, later developing a profile as an independent dancer. She has a prosthetic arm, and expresses the implications of this in the lyrics that accompany her movement: “She [Hanauer] says there's something ironic about the fact that she gets stared at all the time, and then she puts herself up onstage to be stared at, but onstage she can make people look at her the way she wants to be looked at” (Burrows, Fargion, and Glendinning Reference Burrows, Fargion and Glendinning2016). The question of whether people do actually look at her the way she wants them to is a larger question and somewhat immaterial to my discussion of portraiture; what matters is that Hanauer is working with both her internal perception and an authorial perspective on how her movement might be perceived by others. Hanauer's dance contains passing glimpses at the camera, coinciding with lyrics mentioning her shyness, which combine to build the impression of quiet persistence, and of a life in dance that is not always straightforward.

One of the many aspects of 52 Portraits that is compelling is that Burrows articulates the nexus of multiple authorship so explicitly; the series hinges on the transparency of engagement with the portrait contract. Within each portrait, there are multiple aural, visual, and kinesthetic traces of the encounter that produced the portrait, reinforcing West's notion that the encounter always persists as a trace within the image. There are also multiple traces to be found on the website, where the full collection of portraits is housed, providing an archival repository of the real-time encounter between choreographer and performer. Burrows provides documentation of correspondence with performers as preparation for the shoot, offering insight into the subtle negotiations of power and agency within the portrait transaction. He reveals a desire for a level playing field of agency between collaborators in the shaping of the screendance portraits. Prior to coming to Glendinning's studio for the shoot, performers were given some parameters to guide their preparation. The choreography is by each performer, in response to Burrows's framework:

Here, the self-representational choices of the performer are enabled, but such choices are nested within the boundaries of Burrows's representational frame. In terms of the movement, Burrows's frame suggests (1) that old movement is not in fact old but ever current and constitutive of us and (2) that such bodily ghosts provide fertile ground for dance portraiture in a way that the “imagined new” might not. For some performers, a way to interpret the stipulation for familiar or worn out material was to choose previously existing material from well-known pieces. Burrows notes that in such cases, the known becomes unfamiliar again, remixed in the context of the music, lyrics, camera, and the nesting within the larger project (Reference Burrows2016).

Burrows also made a suggestion for how the movement might be structured, namely through musical counts. He suggests the early music structure La Folia that he used himself when making short gestural solos in a prior work, Body Not Fit for Purpose (Reference Burrows and Fargion2014). However, in Burrows's notes to the performers, this structural idea reads as a less binding suggestion than the preference for familiar movement (Reference Burrows2016). The other component of the portrait, which Burrows outlines ahead of time for the performers, relates to how the vocal component will be made. The lyrics that accompany each portrait derive from questions that Burrows asks each performer at the time of the film shoot:

In the final lyrics, traces of the mutual derivation of material are maintained; the lyrics contain fragmented extracts of the conversation with Burrows, stated via “he says,” “she says,” “Mary says,” “Ramsay says,” etc. Thus, in the formation (that is, within the studio process) and internal structure (that is, evidenced in the final work) of both the aural and danced components, there is a to-and-fro movement of artistic decision-making that produces both consistency and difference. West's notion—that a portrait refers not only to a real person but to a real-time transaction in which the terms of representation have been negotiated—is accentuated here.

One portrait that particularly evidences the portrait encounter is that of choreographer Crystal Pite.Footnote ⁷ She chooses to structure her movement in sixes, and as the lyrics for her portrait tell us, she finds it harder to remember things since having a child: “And she says is it ok/if she counts it out loud./And she says is it ok/if she does it just one more time” (Burrows, Fargion, and Glendinning Reference Burrows, Fargion and Glendinning2016). We see and sometimes hear her counting and know from the lyrics that she has performed this dance several times already. In fact, this is evident in the red marks already present on her breastbone that we soon see is rhythmically drummed by her precisely flung hands. The lyrics thus productively undermine the conceit that the performance we are witnessing is a spontaneous event. Instead, we are witness to the construction of the event and to the potential anxiety of its reproduction. The song finishes before her dance, so that for the final few beats, we hear her counting her movements as she does them, and in the context of her lyrics, this reads as a mnemonic device necessary since motherhood. She looks at the camera as her final gesture lands her hands on the table, her expression questioning, seeming to say, “I think I'm happy with that one, what do you think, Jonathan?” Burrows and Glendinning could have edited the solo to exclude that final glance. The choice to include it maintains an overt evocation of the portrait encounter within the final cut.

As with many of the solos, there is an intimacy and informality that serves to open up the portrait transaction for the viewer. There is the flow of the gestural dance, but we also see and hear Pite's relationship to the portrait event. This dual function is facilitated by the warmth that appears present within the studio in the mutual shaping of the portrait; we glean an affective context of exchange. A similar warmth is present in many other portraits, and this factor productively undercuts the global distribution mechanism of the project. The fact that these intimate portraits were intended for global email distribution prompts consideration of the relationship between the particular and the general in portraiture.

Likeness, Type, and Seriality

West suggests that within the history of visual art, portraits are inherently contradictory and can all be placed somewhere on the continuum between specificity of likeness and generality of type (Reference West2004, 21). It seems straightforward to state that a depiction must be “like” the real person to whom it refers in order to be a portrait. However, as West points out, “Likeness is not a stable concept” and “What might be considered a ‘faithful’ reproduction of features relates to aesthetic conventions and social expectations of a particular place and time” (Reference West2004, 22).

No two portraits of a person are entirely alike, though both must be likenesses, with variation brought about by the distinctive style of the artist and the distinct purposes of the portrait, such as solidifying the rank or prestige of the sitter or conveying the inner life of an artist's family. The role of style and purpose in the constitution of the image indicates the limits of representation. That is, no single portrait can be considered definitive of a person, because all portraits can only offer a partial view of the sitter, mediated through the artist's personal capacities with reference to what is generic about the sitter (for example, that she is a woman, a choreographer, a mother). Here, the “generic” can refer to the role a person plays within a society, the conventions that determine how they might be represented, or even what is generic about the artist's style, such that Rembrandt's portraits all bear the mark of Rembrandt as much or as well as the uniqueness of the person portrayed. Thus, the ways in which the generic can be constitutive of a portrait are multiple and can overlap.

The relationship between the particular and the general is an important constituent of portraiture and helps interrogate what it might be that screendance portraits do in the world. As West notes, Erwin Panofsky offered a foundational discussion of the relationship between likeness and type. For Panofsky, a portrait has two simultaneous aims. It strives to show how the person in question is different to other people, and indeed different to how he or she might appear at other moments in time, be that a week hence or a decade ago. At the same time, a portrait strives to show what the person in question has in common with others, such that it maintains a degree of relatedness to others, regardless of place and time. In other words, a portrait must show the uniqueness of an individual as well as show the individual's inclusion in the broader category of humanity (Panofsky Reference Panofsky1971, 194).

The capacity of portraits to show likeness and type simultaneously has a bearing on the function of portraits conceived as series. As discussed, Burrows shows transparency regarding the individual portrait transactions, and the portrait transaction is evidenced in each portrait in different ways. However, this transparency is tangible beyond the individual portrait; it also has a broader function across the series. Within each portrait, the precise conceptual framework provides a platform for shared agency between Burrows and the performers. Across the series, that same framework provides a platform for formal and affective consistency for the viewer that allows meaning to accrue while still accommodating difference. The series sits at the axis between the performers’ self-representational choices and the choreographer's angle on a broader situation.

As discussed, 52 Portraits is not premised on portraiture's fraught promise to reveal the person. The structural properties, and cumulative nature, of 52 Portraits give opportunities to resist and complicate portraiture's revelatory promise. One means by which the series does this is via its mode of distribution. Burrows has commented on the portraits being partially an answer to the type of dance available for consumption online, and contemporary dance's absence from that forum (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 22). So, while loving each dancer or duo's work was a prerequisite for inclusion, Burrows's eye was also on a bigger network.

Screendance scholars Marion Carrot and Marie Montaignac, in an article analyzing dance videos created in series, comment on the way 52 Portraits is configured for distribution and consumption using the viewing conditions of the Internet era (Reference Carrot and Montaignac2018, 21). Burrows cites hybrid media considerations as being foundational to the work: “We decided to make a project which would take the short form of Facebook postings, but give it this accumulating quality, so it might transcend the usual instant and forgettable nature of dance clips on social media” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 22). Additionally, the dancers (with some notable exceptions) are seated at a simple table, frontal to the camera, echoing the viewing situation of the recipient of the emailed works opening a laptop on a table, meaning, as Burrows states, that dancer and viewer are “sharing a familiar technological situation” (22). As Carrot and Montaignac suggest, in co-opting the viewing conditions of the Internet era, the portraits extend the hybridity already at work in screendance (Reference Carrot and Montaignac2018, 21).

Two portraits by independent choreographers who also identify as activists fittingly upend the formal relationship set up by having the dancers seated at a table. Katye Coe performs under and on top of the table, while Karl Jay-Lewin turns it on its end.Footnote ⁸ Other portraits abide by or maximize the formal conceit of the Internet era. Ballerina Zenaida Yanowsky sits behind the table with a quiet command that at times seems to turn the flat surface of the table into a miniature proscenium across which her gestures project themselves.Footnote ⁹ She performs ghosts of balletic gestures that draw whole repertoires in behind them, inhabiting the gestures intimately and personally while also prompting or recalling such gestures’ public manifestation and history. Her lyrics, meanwhile, tell a different story, telling us she has been thinking of retirement and that she is partly dealing with that in this dance. The lyrics cut against the image of a ballerina's perfection, or the feeling of freedom an audience might infer in a dancer; she tells us “one forgets when you have a bad performance how shit it is, and how that feeling of liberation stops” (Burrows, Fargion, and Glendinning Reference Burrows, Fargion and Glendinning2016).

Emilyn Claid, choreographer, director, researcher, and psychotherapist, dances to lyrics that also comment on her relationship to ballet, as a dream that was broken, bringing in its wake endless existential questioning.Footnote ¹⁰ She begins with a commanding angular gesture that disintegrates before morphing into a final gesture approximating ballet's second position of the arms but propelled by an internal oscillatory vibration. The gesture remains in flux rather than arriving at its destination. Meanwhile, we hear that she is not fussed about being an academic, but is really interested in falling down in the studio.

Such contextualizing features complicate the revelatory impulse of portraiture. Burrows articulates how his choices for the lyrics of 52 Portraits were not premised on what would most reveal the person, or even a faithfulness to factual truth. Rather, both his interview questions and the selections made from the answers cumulatively give a picture of the political situatedness of dancers (largely in the UK) at this point in time. The interaction between movement and lyrics, and indeed the project as a whole, did not aim to be autobiographical or therapeutic, but political:

While each portrait might do this to a degree on its own, it is really through the full cumulative picture that the project realizes this aim. As both Hetty Blades (Reference Blades2017) and critic Judith Mackrell point out, it is necessary to view each portrait as belonging to a larger whole, contributing, as Mackrell puts it, to “an impressionistic portrait of the profession” (Reference Mackrell2016). It is rare for a dance project to be conceived in such a rigorously serial manner, and the serial nature of 52 Portraits invites comparisons to the visual arts in which series are more commonplace. As Carrot and Montaignac observe, screendance series function like studies in the visual art field, and cumulatively have a documentary effect (Reference Carrot and Montaignac2018, 20).

Burrows's use of individual portraits to convey a social picture, and Carrot and Montaignac's naming of it as a documentary effect, bring to mind Walker Evans's studies of individuals in the United States during the Depression, and German photographer August Sander's large-scale projects of the 1920s. Sander was working within the mindset of the “New Objectivity” dominant in Germany at the time, characterized by a detached simplicity of image making, and the belief that an “objective” representation of the world was possible. Sander sought to convey the “types” of people living in Germany, and his types spanned social classes, including groups as diverse as circus artists, intellectuals, farm workers, brides, missionaries, and countless other groupings, amassing more than thirty thousand photographs (Freeland Reference Freeland2010, 109).

As West points out, “Because Sander's project was concerned with types rather than individuals, he did not identify most of his sitters by name” (Reference West2004, 28). It could be argued, however, that Sander's project of creating a definitive visual typology was undermined by the high quality of the portraits. That is, though nameless, they are photographed compellingly, and they are real people who really practiced the profession, or experienced the situation, that they represent. As such, we seek and find unique qualities in them that exceed those qualities that belong to the group in question. Each photograph does contribute to a cumulative rendering of a group, but we also read them as individual portraits and seek in the image, despite Sander's attempt to efface them through namelessness, the particular individual to whom they refer. Likeness is elusive, but our desire for it is persistent.

Though aiming to present a style of group portrait, Burrows does not attempt to efface the individual the way Sander did. In some ways, he attempts the opposite; he draws out the social and the political through paying close attention to the particularities of each performer. The reason I make comparisons to Sander is that, through their seriality, both projects bear a relationship to the notion, central to portraiture, of likeness and type. If Sander's project unwittingly gives access to the unique despite its focus on the generic, then 52 Portraits seems to facilitate perception of both the unique and the generic as dualities held in productive suspension. Across the series, there is a tenderness with which the performers are enabled to present themselves in their differences. Simultaneously, each performer is also of their time and place, and hence generalizable to type. The specificity and consistency of Burrows's conceptual frame modulates our perception of each person through siting them in a larger social situation, namely the precarious situation of professional dancers that Burrows sequentially critiques over the course of fifty-two weeks. By allowing commentary on the daily lives of the performers to feature in the lyrics, Burrows refuses to sideline the material conditions under which the portraits are produced. Indeed, the project overtly provides a site for performers to speak directly about “the daily job of surviving” (Burrows in Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 33–34).

The project thus makes available to a wide audience a social commentary on the fragility of the dance profession. The project also poses questions that relate to the internal politics of that profession. While Burrows does not seek to erase individual difference, as did Sander, it could be said that he seeks to erase or at least diminish the hierarchies that exist within the dance profession. He names a foundational value of the work: “Everyone is equal under the roof of the project” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 34). Within the series, well-known choreographers sit side by side with newcomers. The representational conditions and the terms of the portrait transaction are shared by all. The eclecticism of his curatorial choices might appear playful but is also deeply political. Burrows notes that in a performance era characterized by tensions around prioritizing the objective over the subjective or vice versa, portraiture becomes “a dangerous thing to attempt” (Dunn Reference Dunn2016, 32). He is clear, however, that his choice to engage with portraiture is not an attempt to side with the subjective stance within those debates, but rather, to destabilize the premise of the debate itself; through his choice of dancers he questions hierarchical habits within the dance profession that value one approach or style over another.