TV Review : 3 Artists Transferring Movement Onto Screen

Three artists who explore film or video dance show their recent work on a stimulating episode of the “New Television” series tonight at 11:30 on KCET Channel 28.

Jeff McMahon and Charles Moulton each create movement collages that remain wholly subservient to photography and editing techniques. Bridget Murnane faces a thornier task: transferring to the screen solos by Susan Rose and Louise Burns that possess a genuine choreographic shape.

In Murnane’s “To Dancers,” the camera selectively captures the essentials of Rose’s dramatic, seated solo through bold close-ups made more striking by an intense red-and-black color scheme. Cries and drumming by Megan Roberts intensify the imagery. The Burns segment starts in the studio and then follows the dancer into outdoor environments that expand the spatial thrust of the choreography beyond theatrical limits.

“To Dancers” actually represents the second half of Murnane’s “For Dancers” (two and “To” make “For”). The deleted sections are, if anything, more unusual, since they attempt to reconceive classic techniques of shooting dance (long takes, full-body compositions) developed in Hollywood musicals.

Moulton is celebrated in the American avant-garde for his inventive sequencing ploys, and these, indeed, dominate his off-the-wall extravaganza, “Hazardous Hootenanny.” However, here they involve the juggling of split- and multiple-screen panels, some of them cleverly faked. (Watch what happens when performers reach out of frame.) The sax-and-vocal score by Steve Elson is every bit as delirious as the visuals.

Dancing? No. This is gesture processed into camera choreography, something that McMahon also uses--combined with animated stills and plenty of real dance footage--in “Cross Body Ride” to music by Charles Nieland.

Shot in Venezuela, it shows David Zambrano and Donald Fleming on a staircase, on a beach, on a catwalk, in a bed--sometimes emphasizing physical intimacy, elsewhere the space separating the men.

Unabashedly homoerotic, this paean to the male form in motion suffers from McMahon’s generalized swoop-and-lift choreography (derived from contact improvisation) but is very deft in its editing juxtapositions.