Da Da Dancing

From the Artist

Our work is filled with fun. It’s not meant to be drop-dead serious. But it seems like the
way for us to say the most, and art is all about communication.
_{—Excerpted from https://bucksco.michenerartmuseum.org/artists/constance-e-coleman, accessed 6-14-2021}

Da Da Dancing was made by Connie Coleman in collaboration with her husband, Alan Powell. Coleman and Powell saw the video monitor as a window to an alternative visual space or alternative narrative. This work grew out of performance pieces by Coleman and Powell that used multichannel video monitors and tapes to create new sculptural environments and multiple narratives about a particular subject.

Da Da Dancingis part of a larger body of work titled Ballet Digital. These pieces were reflections on how digital culture was changing our concepts of time, space, and culture. Coleman and Powell juxtaposed fragments to undermine our complacencies and assumptions.
_{—Adapted and excerpted from https://www.alanpowellartist.com/ballet-digital-1985-1993/, accessed 6-14-2021}

Video artist Constance (Connie) Coleman uses the camera as a drawing tool, collecting source imagery which she transforms electronically into single channel videotapes. Her work addresses issues of personal identity, gender, politics, and media spectacle. Coleman collaborated with her husband, Alan Powell, beginning in the 1970s when they met while attending Rhode Island School of Design. Individually and collectively they explored, via video, various notions of personality, memory, and community and how meaning can be construed in urban and ex-urban habitats. Coleman and Powell carried a video camera wherever they went, using it “like a sketchbook."
_{—Adapted from https://bucksco.michenerartmuseum.org/artists/constance-e-coleman, accessed 6-14-2021}