Dance on Screen: a Contextual Framework

Abstract

As we face the dawn of a new millennium and cast a fleeting glance back at the late twentieth century, it is the mass media and its debris of popular artefacts that has come to characterize our everyday lives. We inhabit a culture of mass production in that media technologies can facilitate the rapid recording, reproduction and multiplication of sounds, texts and images. These apparati of communication comprise radio (and related systems of sound reproduction), film, print media, television and, more recently, digital formats such as CD-Roms and the internet (Kellner, 1995). The products of the mass media are constructed to appeal to a wide audience in order to generate vast financial profit. Hence the notion of ‘mass’ pertains to both production and reception. It is apparent that media culture is saturated by visual signs; two-dimensional, technologically produced representations. The images of film, television, videos, magazines, advertisements, computer graphics and electronic games bombard both public and private space. Within this visual landscape images have become the common currency As everyday spectators of this distinctive cultural existence, we are adept at reading the complex relay of intertextual images. To sum up the prevalence of two-dimensional signs, the late twentieth society has been described as the ‘society of spectacle’ (Jameson, 1991).