After weeks of teaching and meeting on Zoom, I along with the rest of the world, it seemed, were trying to situate our senses through the screen, and especially through the Brady Bunch effect of the grid. I was interested in capturing the disembodied feeling of sitting in our little squares, waiting for the borders to open up. I thought I would dance through the grid, one box at a time, but when Ric started to load it into Premiere, we saw the possibility of many mes all at once.
Then I created a score that delineated the dynamics (and variation of white, gray, and black) for each box, with some eye to physical alignments (the diagonals of various leg gestures lining up for example). A lot of it was happenstance but some were very deliberate with an eye to what was above and below me as I recorded it. I always knew the bottom right box would be the one that observed the rest of the squares, and so it's the only one that explicitly acknowledges the rest of the landscape, and of course, is the last to "walk off" - also planned. I hoped the Row 2 Column B would creep so slowly across you wouldn't see the movement but look back and realize I had shifted. Row 2 Column A I made a recording based on Row 1 Column A (which you can hear) in order to keep me directly "under" the body above.
I had thought we would layer a sound score but when we heard all the actual sounds from all 12 videos, we kept it. I also thought we would stop each video before I exited the frame, but we kept my exits, for the most part, along with the sound of my timer going off (2'22" for my recordings). Alarms have an edge of alarm, and it seemed to fit.
Lastly, I had to keep my frame as consistent as possible - I taped my boundaries with painter's tape on the wall and floor, just out of the screen. I spiked the position for my laptop on top of some boxes, and each recording had several "takes". I got very used to the tightness of each pieces - it was a tiny amount of space to move in, and a challenge to come up with some range of choreographic elements within that restriction.
Link to the video: https://vimeo.com/427218382