Hula Girl - Rough Draft

I have been playing with hula hoops. You may have witnessed if you have been following the blog. This video is a rough draft of Hula Girl (truly just a working title). This past month, Brent and I have been collaborating on a storyboard. We were playing with split screen ideas and such. At this point, I won't bombard you with a play by play of the story. I leave to enjoy, for now. Please post comments if you are inspired.

Salvage.Recycle.Repeat

A snippet of movement material from rehearsal #3 of “the mega piece”. And, no that is not gratuitous, sexy-dance, self-touching you’re seeing. Shame on you. It makes sense in the larger context of the piece. I do plan to shoot it from this angle and from much higher, and, at the moment anyway, it will be paired with a corresponding live performance.

If some of this choreography looks familiar, it’s because I stole some of it from myself. A few years back, I started work on a piece that never quite came together as far as movement and concept are concerned. Actually, at times the choreography and concept felt like two magnets I was trying to push together. I didn’t show it very much. I was really frustrated with it (despite a lovely performance from Kristen and amazing video from Brent). I feel like I finally found a “home” for this movement. Lots more to come.

PS and, am I crazy? Do you feel you’ve seen 20 dance pieces the past several years that have used this “In the Mood for Love" music? It’s lovely, but getting music composed.

Patterns II

As I mentioned in my last post I am working on a new video piece for our show at Monkey Town with Oliphant on Dec 6th (fetch the cleaver!). The last post dealt with my attempts to create patterns that I could then subvert.

The piece has a title now: Tidal. Which is problematic only in that whenever I say it, it sounds like I am saying Title. I am sure this will lead to some hilarious Who's On First routine in the near future. The patterns are coming into focus. A little too much, actually. One of the nice things about the previous iteration (in that last post I think I mentioned) is its organic feel.



Something has definitely been lost. I shot new footage and I became enamored in my head with creating a binary system. Most likely because it was easier to wrap my head around, I filmed the new bits so they would move from white to black and back. While this did make it easier to structure the sections, it made it a little too easy. By setting up a strictly binary system, the box aspect of the overall structure was highlighted. With only 144 pixels (16x9) it is difficult to create organic patterns. Easy to make big boxes, though!



So the next step is to pull back from this. While the first version was too muddy and indistinct, I need to recapture the organic nature of it, but try and maintain the clarity of the newer version. Honing in on it. 2.5 weeks to go!