Pandemic. Stay home. Get masks. Have fabric. Dig out sewing machine. Make masks. Give masks away. Make more masks. Wear masks. Begin to get used to the look and feel of wearing a mask. I picture doing a piece where I can only do eye make up because of the mask-wearing. Then I plan to wear as many masks as layers of the make up, doing a slow reveal until the last one. I thought it would be funny.
Tried some versions. Problems: how to set up the iphone camera in a way that I could see myself enough to do the make up but still look like I'm more or less looking at the screen directly? What to wear? What kind of background? What sound? How to end it? How to set up the make up without having to constantly look down to pick things up? How to do the make up without constantly leaning close in to do the details like when you get close to the mirror to put on eye liner? How to deal with the raw facts of my skin and age up close and personal? How to keep it interesting after the first mask comes off and the viewer now knows there are layers to go? If and how to include "dancerly" movement? Pretty quickly my little conceit turned into interesting choreographic questions.
Saw my cousin's video of her daughter cutting her hair over a 3 hour period done with a time lapse! Aha, let me try that? Possibilities. But to get a 1 minute piece I had to take over 10 minutes to do the actual filming. I learned to move very slowly, deliberately, trying to keep my head and eyes in the same place for those 10 minutes, all while noticing a challenge with breathing through 8 masks. Camera: Taped to a mirror in horizontal selfie mode, with me sitting in front of the camera eye, such that I could see myself just past the camera into the mirror and I looked centered on the screen. Make up: all prepped, caps off, lids open, etc. Set up on the window sill (I was kneeling for the filming) just past the mirror at my eye-level so I could reach forward, not down. Background - went with multi-color, fabric, crazy-quilt idea of the masks and hung a family quilt on a clothes rack, close enough not to see the edges.
The final tape was about 50 seconds long. You couldn't tell all the masks were actually on me. It could be read as just quick changes of masks. So Ric did the editing to slow down the removal of each mask so it's legible.
Ending. I had many versions in other takes. Sometimes playing with a gaping mouth, sometimes just staring. The final take, I really had a shock seeing my face revealed, unadorned except from the eyes up, raw, and my hands went to cover my face. Not planned. And we decided to keep the final reach to turn it all off. Sound. I had bought some sound effects tracks from a royalty free website and loved this "Band Warming Up" for the pathos of such impossible gatherings at this time. Title. Touch and Go - as in daily life right now, as in touch up and no where to go, as in touch my face and go, etc.
Link to the video: https://vimeo.com/430566462
'Touch and Go.' Powerful. The final image of your unmasked face was startling----and vulnerable, somehow. Thank you. I felt not alone in the dismay and distress of pandemic days watching this. Perfect sound track for the piece----