This piece is literally layered. It is layered with its iterative stages of process, with clothing, with connotations, with sounds, and with my own evolution during the pandemic and social change movements. The movement originated as a phrase (a term choreographers use for a sequence or a "combo") in late spring 2020 when I had to teach my students dance technique online. It is derived from a "score" that has 10 movements initiated from the head, 10 from the shoulders, then an insert of 5 "whole body" movements, then 10 arms, 10 hands, 5 whole body, 10 ribs, 10 hips, 5 whole body, 10 knees, 10 ankles, and 5 whole body, adding up to 100. In this video, I also added riffs on some of the gestures, layering some more dynamics and nuance.
I decided early on I would do one of my choreovids using this "100's", as we called it, but it took a while to land on how, where, and why. I was interested in the highlighting of body parts (has an inherent vulnerability?), and how it strongly used the z axis, towards and away from the camera, as part of the design, hence my search for a long, deep space.
There was an awkwardness to the movement, and a kind of dogged progress from the top of the body to the bottom, and it had a counting theme - somehow saying the numbers while dancing was oddly, well, odd. I knew I wasn't going to make this a pretty dance - but wanted to forefront the grit of getting through and counting the days, weeks, and months, as we seem to slowly grasp the on-goingness of the pandemic. There's also the constant counting of coronovirus cases, deaths, as well as social justice counts of deaths, protests, and more.
I thought of the virus spreading across the world, my country, my body; I thought of black lives matter spreading across our consciousness and conscience; I thought of my body part score as a metaphor for transmission, and bit by bit exposing our vulnerabilities. I began to imagine making the body parts highly visible and legible. That's when I got to work cutting apart and re-sewing various red things I owned, and constructed the layers. The red mask is constant, both a simple advocacy for masks, and perhaps a vision of muted-ness, or a death mask, or a scream.
I searched and searched for some space that could lend some imagery of labor, danger, and not-prettiness - eventually found an abandoned parking lot at the east end of the Columbus airport. The planes taking off became another layer adding connotations of imminent danger, escape, and global spread.
The sound score includes tracks from "The Conet Project" - recordings of mysterious number sequences and other sounds from shortwave radio number stations. They are purported to be code transmissions for spies, and remain obscure in their origin, import, and use. Besides the haunting sound, I thought the idea of coding, counting in multiple languages, and transmission layered well with my concerns about the spread of the virus as well as the de-coding of white privilege.
Finally, it's long at a little over 8 minutes. Too long, says my internal critic, but I decided to keep it at that - first, none of these videos are going to have internal edits, and secondly, the very idea of patience, persistence and discipline to stay the course seemed kind of the point.
The video: https://vimeo.com/439795173
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