GFF 2011: Celluloid Choreography

As artists across disciplines become more excited by the possibilities of fusing apparently separate media, the traditional division between performance and representation has become blurred. While choreographers frequently use projections, film has responded to theatre by adapting approaches and techniques to question the very nature of the medium. Spanish born dancer, choreographer and visual artist La Ribot's recent move into cinematography, seen at last years's National Review of Live Art, suggested that the camera itself could dance: even Scottish Ballet's Romeo and Juliet featured documentary footage.

Miranda Pennell, having trained as a contemporary dancer and visual artist, has moved away from the simple idea of representing traditional dance on stage, preferring to film mundane activity as if it were dance. By taking social behaviour as a basis for many of her short films, she has recontextualised army drills, musicians playing only for themselves, and fighting in the pub; by simultaneously alienating the actions and engaging the viewer, her films ask questions not only about the definition of dance, but about the connection between documentary and fictional film-making.

For her latest piece, Why Colonel Bunny was Killed, receiving its Scottish premiere at the GFF, Pennell has slowed the usual cinematic pace to a series of stills. Set in the Afghan borders, a location filled with political resonance, it juxtaposes music and reclaimed images from the turn of the century. The focus of the film perhaps has a stronger narrative intention than many of her works, but it retains the haunting, almost abstract quality that is her hallmark: by encouraging the viewer's attention to detail, she avoids the usual hectic flood of images that characterises most mainstream cinema.

In her studies of a military drill and a pub brawl (which is choreographed to reflect the conventions of cinema or stage fighting rather than a closing time ruckus), the attention to detail makes the familiar oddly alien: the drill is recast as an obscure ritual, incomprehensible to the viewer. Her studies of dancers - such as You Made Me Love You - are less interested in capturing any performance than using the movement of the camera to create the impression of dance.

Although preoccupied with formal experimentation, drawing on both dance and film theory, Pennell's work is far from a dry analysis of surface or technique. Fisticuff is a comic glance at the gap between violence on screen and real life, twisting the pub into a cosmic arena for battle; Magnetic North challenges the tension within gender stereotypes; and Colonel Bunny, simply by virtue of it location, forces serious consideration of how colonialism still shapes British engagement with the rest of the world.

In a recent interview with Gail Tolley, Pennell commented that the association of her film with dance was perhaps a consequence of her training than any real connection within the work - after all, she notes, there is no actual dancing in the films. Nevertheless, it is her aesthetic, fueled by modern analysis of performance and the experimental ethos of contemporary visual art, that lends her direction the swing and style of a choreographer.