The feeling I’m not alone/ I think this is a solo for three selves
Shadow, the present absence, and pushing through the skin: all of this material is an introduction to other parts of myself, and the binary between self and other has become less stark in contrast. Going deeper. The shadow metaphor for the shadow self is a test in response to feedback from NYC. It transmits a kind of multiplicity – a trace and also a foreshadowing – that moves with the body, in unison with the body, but is a fractured representation that also modifies the features of the subject. More on shadows to come… Thinking about Nietchze’s theory of midday (LOOK up artist), when there is no visible difference between the object and its shadow. Looking into more Rebecca Solnit, and Plato’s cave, and how no representation is ever complete. There’s something about shadow captured by video that interests me – where is the subject in relation to her shadow, where is the subject in relation to the camera… Sometimes the shadow has its own life. This looks like an exorcism.
I tried floating in and out of the frame more, to play off the fixed position of the camera and its limited peripheral sightlines. Instead I’m thinking about the blurry images as ‘peripheral’ so the body becomes a globular outline, a mass of fuzz, and not the representation of a person in the same way that the focused image delivers.
I’m experimenting with the axis of the wall and changing the plane of the camera. This offers a kind of disorientation that is differently dizzying than the GoPro stuff from the Fall because in moments, even though it’s obvious that I’m moving against wall, the body becomes something else. It is suspended with a different sense of gravity. I’m noticing this month how the camera is a tool for transferring the meditative affect of physiological change via changes in attention.
Where the two walls meet presents an opportunity to represent difference. Two screens, meeting at a porous intersection, and then me: it is a unison trio. Trio A thank you Yvonne Rainer. Sometimes the shadows appear to have their own agency, as if their movements are independent of mine. The difference between a body and the representation of a body, as filtered through lens, lights, sound, etc. The formation of identity is also the splintering of identity.
A happy accident: there is a reflection on the floor for one dance sequence. I remember a piece that was entirely viewed through the floor reflection (LOOK UP, mtl artist), with the curtain lowered to only reveal shins and feet, and the rest was seen through the floor. The way reflection distorts physical orientation could be useful to pursue.
I’ve been working with vectors in previous dance scores, and noticing the difference between imagined pathways and physical outcomes of actually traversing those pathways. The imagination doesn’t calculate.
What if emotions were also considered vectors, since they are only emotions (and not moods) because they reference something (mad at someone, proud of myself, afraid of bears, etc). Emotions are thus relational and imply energetic movement towards or away from their object of interest. If they move, then they are also fluid. Can they have a material presence in dance form? I thought about people who talk too close to your face, or operate with different measurements for negotiating space. I translated this into a movement proposal of continuously ‘stepping a little bit too far’. I like the urgency of this study, and the quality that emerges, where hesitancy, calculation, and grappling, provisional movements, all pull at each other. This proposal is at the brink of something. It makes me think of walking down stairs, and thinking there’s an extra step, but the floor hits surprisingly sooner than the mind had calculated for, sending the knees buckling.
Emotion as vector creeps into the face movement improv, although with more subtlety, referencing pedestrian signifiers. I keep remembering that the biggest distance is the space between two heads. I think I heard that in a movie. I watch myself in these videos and feel the same distance, between my present head and my video head(s). The gap between selves: maybe this is the perceptive line of difference I’ve been locating?
A movement improv often reads as something other than the parts of its construction/ more than what I’m actually doing. The desire, or automatic activity to produce meaning is there, whenever the other/object of difference is encountered.
The sound score this week is more of a collage. I layered drone hums from a score where I sung a note, then a different note, and then wherever I thought the perfect centre note would be between the two. A, C, B. Singing the zero.
1 + 1 = 0
My friend Coman introduced me to this Buddhist riddle.
Maybe it should read 1 + (-1) = 0
The collage includes more blatant overlapping of the sounds from within the room, the camera itself (focusing), rehearsal music from within the room, and my inner voice (singing and dialogue). They become cacophonous, but also form a wash of noise that the viewer has to make selections from in order to hear anything specific. Interior and exterior found sounds, and a selective listener. Is this the active/passive binary of participatory art?
Next: rhythm as a force for representation and structuring choreography.
