Arose – Info
Arose is a 4.5-minute screendance featuring four dancers, who hold red roses and wear matching red garments. They bring to life the imagery of rose petals floating down early spring creeks. Arose features emotive ensemble and solo movement, pointe ballet, and poetry onscreen from within an enchambered space. Arose distinctly combines the word’s dualmeaning of arising, and of roses themselves, through three motifs: first, enchamberment within the studio, set, frame, and temporal moment; secondly, a somnambulist heart-led directionality; and third, the potent waters of first spring.
The film’s red theme foregrounds the heart as a vessel of spiritual and logical clarity: two performers recite “Arose, I from deep slumber, long a somnambulist, awakened by the tender beat of my own heart.” Each dancer “arose” to a clarity, that emerges from the values of the present moment rather than future vision. Buddhist philosopher Lau Tzu said, “the longest journey you will take in life is from your head to your heart.”
A creek visually conveys the forward momentum of gravity: evoking linear and cyclical time amid the dancer’s journeys through love and loss. Rose petals flow downward through the stream, representing unity and separation, and succumbing to the ebb and flow of biological rhythms. The rose’s supposed stillness when rooted contrasts with its uncontrolled flow through water in this film. There is a ‘loss of purity’ as the petals become disparate and individuated, representing how lived experience fragments and dissolves the self as the modernist illusion of separation shatters, and the intersubjective ecology of being is embraced. Gravity acts as a form of fate, necessitating acceptance of change, even when we think we are rooted — contesting notions of perpetual stillness as a more ‘valuable’ or ‘pure’ meditative essence than movement. While Arose evokes the vernal qualities of spring such as thawing, growth, and renewal, it also points to the inevitability of decay, in that “all things must fall.”
The dancers’ beguiling emotional passion and distance draws upon how the heart’s guidance has been at times historically misconstrued as romantic idealism or dreamlike confusion — a Neptunian malefic. Yet born from those chaotic waters is the goddess Aphrodite, who facilitates humanity’s era-transcendent need to grapple with both love and war. Sensorial pleasures and inner sparks ask with Venusian clarity how to move through the world in heart-centered ways: how we dance as though it is possible for everything to work out, and how to move with vulnerability and passionate resolve as stepping stones to harmony.
In Arose, a dance studio is strewn with red clothes, roses, and kitsch elements to create a feeling of enchamberment. The dancers’ movements embody the metaphorical significance of somnambulism, meaning “sleep walking,” within leading a heart-led life. Sleepwalking — motivated by unconscious will — foregrounded the turn of the century ideation on dream interpretation and psychoanalysis. The separation between conscious and subconscious becomes at once cleared and blurred by the somnambulist. Sleepwalking was prominent theme within the Symbolist and Romantic movements of the late 19th century, which also inspire this film’s elements of melodrama, simplicity, and mystery.
Arose draws its initial poetic inspiration from two films by the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. Her most well-known work Meshes of the Afternoon, made in 1943, is a hallmark of bringing feminist introspection to cinema, through floral and domestic symbolisms, and states of trance, that are drawn from in this film. Arose also is in no small part inspired by Deren’s unfinished 1951 dance film, Ensemble for Somnambulists, which is a seven-minute silent black-and-white film that features five dancers who move through trancelike states in orbital rotations amid a twinkling cosmic background.
CREDITS
Directed, filmed, written, and edited by Lily Selthofner
Choreographed by Lily Selthofner in collaboration with the cast
Onscreen performers:
Adara Allen – dancer
Nadia Benes – dancer
Jalen Ford – dancer, actor
Desislava Kreminlieva – dancer, actor
Music: Gates Pass – Composed and Performed by Rory Bricca