This paper navigates through the author’s process of photography and screendance during two specific cross-cultural collaborations in an effort to understand more deeply her creative process. In these dance projects, she analyzes and positions the camera as a witness and as a dancing body with attention to kinaesthetic empathy, improvisation, framing, and editing. This analysis explores the possibilities of cocreating with the camera and dancer in a current technological and internet landscape. She situates this analysis as a negotiation between her relationship with the camera and her own subjectivity as a Kathak dance practitioner within the context of dance and film in India. This paper detours from perceiving the camera as a passive, ethnographic, and historical experience in India and centers the discussion around the relationship between the moving body and the camera. The author then describes her pedagogy for the university classroom which arose from her creative process. By proposing the camera as an instigator to provoke an inquiry-based filmmaking process for students, she facilitates new ways to see, listen, create and connect in their tumultuous and unsteady pandemic world of 2020.