Blog: Claudia Kappenberg
Title: The Art of Sabbatical

I completed a sabbatical in 2009 and returned to teaching at the University of Brighton since January 2010. However, various research projects continue and I may as well continue the blog. Blogging is useful to reflect on process and the site turns over time into a valuable archive. The blog mainly tracks the AHRC Screendance Network and development for the new International Journal of Screendance. It also functions as a reflective space on current events in the field of screendance and related performance and screen-based practices. You can email me

Not About Everything, Created and Performed by: Daniel Linehan

16 May 2012 – Brighton Festival, The Basement, Brighton, U.K.

This is the second time I see this work and it was just as powerful as the first time. Why? This is somewhat hard to say. The simplicity of the form, perpetual spinning, is strong and mesmerizing, but that is not it. The constant stripping away of all superfluity is magnificent, and clever, and draws you into its spell, but this does not adequately describe the work either.

Linehan spinns and chants to the sound of his own recorded voice; “This is not about everything, this is not about being impressed by me, this is not about….”

As a review in the NewYorker from the 3rd December 2007 wrote; The chanting expands into a list of what the piece isn’t about, a list that anticipates, and negates, just about every possible description of the piece - including this one.” And so I am, left speechless.



Issue # 2, of The International Journal of Screendance now available

Scaffolding the Medium

Scaffolding the Medium brings together a number of historical texts within the context of screendance as part of an endeavor to build a variable scaffolding, one that begins to both create a common knowledge base and also to support a kind of cantilevered interdisciplinarity. This issue opens with an edited transcript of a presentation by Professor Ian Christie originally delivered at the first seminar of the Screendance Network at the University of Brighton in September 2009, in which Christie surveys a history of cinema under the title The Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented. This transcript is followed by five curated discussions which each take as their initial premise a key text that speaks to concerns relevant to the discourse of contemporary screendance. Iterative texts by writers including, Martin Heidegger, Amelia Jones, Laura Mulvey, Rosalind Krauss and Pia Ednie-Brown inspire reflections by Ann Cooper Albright, Ann Dils, Kent de Spain, Lisa Naugle and John Crawford, Tom Lopez, Harmony Bench, Hannah Kosstrin, Jason Farman, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Douglas Rosenberg, Virginia Piper, Terry Sprague, Rodrigo Alonso, Claudia Rosiny, Kyra Norman, Miranda Pennell, Augusto Corrieri, Simon Ellis, Dianne Reid and Lucy Cash. Artist’s pages by Adam Roberts, reviews by Scott deLahunta and Claudia Rosiny and a section on Maya Deren by Elinor Cleghorn.  Finally, the issue features a report on the recent Screendance Symposium in Brighton by Claudia Kappenberg and Sarah Whatley.  This issue is edited by Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg.

The International Journal of Screendance is produced by the Centre for Screendance at the University of Brighton and published by Parallel Press at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

For ordering information in the US please visit here

For ordering in the UK, as well as inquiries on submissions please email here

Current Call for Submissions.

WHAT MATTERS 11-15 April 2012

Siobhan Davies Studios, 85 St George’s Road, London SE1 6ER (map)

What Matters follows on from the highly successful What If… festival which took place in 2010, at the Siobhan Davies Studios.

Co-curated by Cash and Edmunds, together with Claudia Kappenberg, Chirstinn Whyte and Gill Clarke from Independent Dance, the festival sought to encourage an expanded perception of what might be seen as ‘dance’ work.

Returning to the Siobhan Davies Studios for four days in April 2012, Cash and Edmunds will be presenting another thoughtfully curated programme of screenings, performance, debate and discussion located throughout the building, this time under the title of What Matters. This will be a unique opportunity to see a range of experimental work and choreographic enquiry across traditional art-form boundaries from the UK, Europe and further afield.

Sitting somewhere between a choreographed exhibition and an exhibited choreography, the curators delve into what really matters in the context of these artists’ practices.

What Matters is presented by Independent Dance in association with Siobhan Davies Dance and South East Dance. Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Additional support from the International Journal of Screendance. Produced by Artsadmin with straybird.