Abstract

This article presents an interdisciplinary conversation between the authors discussing the potential of cultivating a feminist, embodied, ecological approach to screendance and environmental attunement in video dance performance. It draws from Lux Eterna’s artistic research and body of work including the film AURA NOX ANIMA (2016) filmed on the sandy dunes in Anna Bay, New South Wales, Australia, and her current development in dance film production: THE EIGHTH DAY (2023) in conversation with Sarah Pini to consider the presence and embodied situatedness of the artist-maker in shaping visual experience in screendance. Through open-ended interviews to one another, the authors ask if the cultivation of an ecological perspective can offer forms of resistance to hegemonic modes of seeing and experiencing the body on screen. These reflections are theoretically contextualized through establishing their relation to ecological frameworks, feminist literature and an ethnographic approach to dance and the lived body. With this dialogical article, the authors invite a reconsideration of the notion of place and emplacement as key elements informing processes of screendance and aesthetic experience.