I experimented last summer with tipping my laptop sideways to capture a vertical image in zoom, which seemed more apt for a dancing body than our pervasive horizontal. It didn’t work for those on the receiving end. Pretty quickly I was playing with the resulting reversal of gravity, and it seemed a perfect metaphor for the disorientation of living through a pandemic. “Wall Tilt” went on my list of 19ChoreOVIDs.
I set this one aside till January, partly because I thought it would be a pretty simple one to make, and partly because I have been mindful of which ChoreOVID follows which. I’ve tried to alternate things like humor/pathos; words/music; colorful/muted; indoors/outdoors; zoom-based/camera-based; etc. So this one, being interior, zoom-based, with some levity and not a lot of elements needed to come after something bigger – which #14 Social D ancing was.
But I then ran into another problem. What I had was a one-trick pony – I could do a few movements or positions that were “as if” the wall was the floor, and play with the viewer’s expectations and sense of gravity’s “truth.” However, doing a piece with just one element that can be deciphered pretty quickly was against my conviction to give each piece “layers” or multiple meanings and threads. I returned to thinking about the metaphor of disorientation or “skewing” and as I researched that word, I wrote a text that gives the viewer some other information and ideas that complicate notions of being off balance, at odds with the world, and questioning what truth is.
Why the cards? In part, as I look at the whole of the 19 ChoreOVIDs, I have spoken to the camera, recorded myself reading a story, and except for the letters on cards for the anagram piece I had not used text for the viewer to read. The DIY aspect of hand-lettered cards felt appropriate to this particular piece’s musing, and when I watch videos in social media of people telling stories with big poster boards and hand written letters, it always comes across as personal, even confessional, and somehow packs a certain kind of emotional punch more than just speaking the words would. Additionally, I liked how handling the cards while doing difficult things against gravity magnified the struggle of the topic itself.
I started doing this in my studio, but the walls and floor would be reminiscent of #1, #3, #8, and #13, so I found another space in our newly renovated basement where the carpet gave me some needed traction. The black and white nature of the space led to the costume with black and white stripes underscoring the sense of orienting ourselves in space, and a not-so-subtle tug at the question if truth and falsehood is black and white.
The piece: https://vimeo.com/506898401
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