Two words are enough in order to create a nice bag upon which one can read the words "dance video." One can reach inside and take out a complete assortment of documentaries, performance recordings, and creative works that ail involve dance simply because some dancers can be seen there. Distinctions cannot be made according to image media, but since the end of the nineteen-eighties there is a clear tendency toward a return to film, at least as far as the creative field is concerned.
In order to arrive at a history of the dance video that goes beyond a simple stock-taking, it is necessary on the one hand to define one's spatial scale and on the other to assume that the author of these lines has encyclopedic knowledge - which, just
between you and me, I'm inclined to doubt. Is that which I see from near or far still dance, do I recognize it from near or far as video? If I cannot establish a simply quantifiable distance there, then my space is no longer measurable, and I must consider instead a qualitative study of the system of "video dance."

Will I have better results by setting up a system of reference points? Is reference at the basis of conformism? Or to the contrary? In any case references as a system constrain us and have the effect of a closed circuit. In order to correctly understand my point of view, the reader should know that I am a dancer, choreographer and director. In 19861 decided together with Nicole Corsino to seek out other spaces for dance performances by developing "choreographic"fictions" in which video plays the role of writing material and writing territory. For those who seek a comprehensive history of the subject, i refer them to the already published texts of people such as Laurence Louppe.
I thus propose to consider this problem from a specific historical perspective, then to subject it to a morphological reading followed by hypotheses about the consistency inherent to the common existence and development of these two means of exaltation known as Dance and Video.

The same moment at the end of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of Contemporary Dance, its liberation from the academic canon and the straightjacket of social-corporative constraints, and the birth of Cinematography, whose development was initially based on studies of the body movements of people and animals and only then quickly be came a powerful tool of artistic expression. Without going in detail, it seems clear that the coincidence was not accidental, and both genres very quickly became allies. The rise of Video decades later gave dancers, choreographers, dance instructors, and generally all people who set their bodies into motion according to sequences of time, a means for directly seeing and studying themselves. The initial ideas were:

- For cinema, to study of body movements by means of images;
- For video, to see what one desired immediately (and in its entirety).

These ideas mutually complement each other in ways that do not necessarily follow a given sequence (except for the vector of time). The direct or immediate revision of an art considered ephemeral is thoroughly seductive: it becomes a physical need. In France of the nineteen-seven- ties it was possible to witness the beginning of socalled Dance Video, which consisted mainly of recordings of courses, performances, and also verbal sequences: dance was essentially an oral tradition. Being able to observe oneself immediately has a disadvantage: the lack of distance toward the image, the images. And if one wants hat which has been re-corded to become corporeal, one must construct, deconstruct, and thus edit. To write, to graph. To videograph. You have to take your time in order to transform video into Vi- deography. In the area of Dance, France of the nineteen-eighties saw the emergence of new choreo-gra- phers who created a new approach to the creation and presentation of dance on the stage. The isolated adventures of a few video artists who worked with choreographers according to the New York example were Institutionalized; and in 1984 a competition was organized by the Ministry of Culture, in 1989 a competition took place with the partnership of television, in 1987 two festivals were established.

Certain choreographers became directors and worked primarily for the cinema even as they continued to present stage performances: the genre of "dance video" was made more precise and became clarified in both senses of the term in the nineties. On one hand actual video works are becoming rarer; on the other, the big choreographers are tending toward the big screen. Meanwhile interest is focusing gradually on the side of the Documentary, for here one can find detailed information and an exotic aspect from the early period that has been lost. There are several reasons for the increasing rarity of works combining dance andvideo. Apart from the problems of the art market and the television broadcasters which constitute an external problem that I do not treat here, two basic elements can be distinguished: one is based on the reductive attempt to associate two concepts in order to circumscribe an as yet non-existent process, while the other tends to comprehend a genre of swiftness solely as a question of aesthetics.Beyond choreographic and videographic expressions that follow their own internal functional models (roughly: "this here is dance and that there is video art"), there still remains something else, something universal to human nature that accompanies it through the millenia and appears as a fundamental core of construction: narration. Narration defined in the following sense: storytelling in the broadest sense of the word. This, as Carlo Ginzburg put it, means to speak here and now with the authority of thaf which one has seen here and in this moment.

To me it seems useful to find out how one can extend the processes of storytelling and expand the range of definition of the dance video.

During my progress through the realization of choreographic fictions, I have realized that dance - the fact of living in this movable space, of moving my body - has given me the ability to feel that I am located at a junction between space and time, a point between my actions and the perceptions of an imaginary trip of my skin and my bones. At a particular place I reveal to myself and others a spatiotempo- ral displacement condensed in the superimposition of two states of being, and fhus find myself in an elementary narrative process in the sense defined above. In a first contact with the immediate transcription of video, I can see myself doing this, but in particular / can differentiate between the two states and exploit the possible paths from one to the other. The structural isomorphism of the feelings and structures which I then create between these two ways gives me the initial desire to connect the moving mate-rials of dance and video. And at this point there intervenes the will to carry dance out of the space of the stage. To find unique spaces one must travel on the map. Narrative literature is often equipped with maps or atlases. The cartography of places sustains an ambivalent relationship to choreography and creates a narrative space, it allows us to understand that the “story" takes place in a system of permanent spatial relations. In order to give the others, the audience, the chance to notice this visible space, which is precisely not supposed to represent a stage/ spectator space configuration, one must use the tool of the camera to picture it and to create a dual map upon which the dependencies of sign and place occur on two levels, for it allows us to leave the “story" or to stay within it. The dancing figures belong to the history of the sequence or announce in a certain way the following one or even one that has already been experienced. Thus they leave the reader his freedom, allow him to put together the elements of his own trip, his own riddle. The expansion of the choreogra- phical field reveals its temporary invisibility. The cut in the space of the image extends the discrete electronic universe to a macroscopic level and continues through differentiation of other elements such as places, frames, interlocking of sequences, objects, or machines. One no longer looks at the screen. One enters into sowed fields, here and there. One moment the body can be spotted, the next grabbed, it passes the relay, dis- appears in the tension of the cut. Dance is omnipresent even when the body disappears, for the written, chosen, defined movement has an infinite variety of components depending on how one changes the scale. There is a spatialization of the image, the way that one speaks of spatialization of sound - all the way to loss of one's senses. What a pleasure to lose and then refind one's senses. These three theses redefine dance video and reorient a possible deconstruction of the edifice of video dance toward a substra- oi element. Deconstruction is construction through elimination, f the elimination of dance video were to lead to the disappearance of the word, this would already be an achievement for the direction that we have in mind when we speak of Dance and ideo, and would enable us to gauge more precisely the errors ° f appreciation, those most frequent sources of the most beautiful disco veries.