Portfolio & Work

Upward Spiral is an experimental Screendance documentary that navigates the subjective embodiment of selves, objects, and spaces, forging paths between aloneness and togetherness.

I created Upward Spiral to explore the subjectivities of embodiment that hover in the gaps between ourselves and the living world: public and private selves, the butterfly effects of pasts, presents, and futures, inner children and adults, responses to life’s traumas and joys, complex growth and simple being.

First, I worked with cast members one-on-one to create single-shot films that explored how sacred objects, spaces, and routines are embodied within their internal lives. Woven together, these individual experiences portray collective rituals and moods of identity and grounding – as represented by the ‘object-altar’ – where meaning meets material in the body.

I also collected 43 drawings, where I asked people to draw their response to the question: “How do you feel in your body right now?” During the rehearsal process, my cast and I explored how movement can influence, represent, and be inspired by ‘body drawing’ as a shared mode of articulation. We also played games and journaled to explore where the self changes between in connection, isolation, safety, and freedom – these processes culminated in a series of audio interviews in the film.

Altogether, the interconnection of many intense subjective experiences guides the audience through a fundamentally human Upward Spiral toward a more articulately embodied togetherness in this experimental film.

December 2022

Screenings:

CoLab Performing Arts Collective Fall 2022 Showcase

Pop-up: Screendance Showing

The brain can at times be a mechanical bull that we cling to with one grimy hand. Here, mechanics of modern convenience come into intimate, messy contact with biological and neurotic human behavior. This short film, Satisficing, explores compulsion and interjection in everyday routines.

“Satisficing” is a popular term that combines the verbs “to satisfy” and “to sacrifice,” to describe the act of prioritizing realism and momentum, over the exhaustive and paralytic pursuit of perfection. A ‘satisficer’ makes do and moves forward, steering toward survival.

In psychology, ‘satisficing’ pushes back against ‘maximizing,’ trading endless analysis for quick, workable decisions. In economics, ‘satisficing’ habits lean into bounded rationality, where material and information are always limited. In management, ‘satisficers’ champion progress over perfection. In evolutionary biology, ‘satisficers’ ensure survival by balancing resources and risk.

The nature of organisms — our connections, internal worlds, and the social and technological systems we create — are dependent on the satisficer model, in many ways for better and for worse. This film dives into how ‘satisficing’ contributes to the neurotic underbelly of the social unconscious inhabited by the individual. Are we perceived as messy and scary, by the technology we’ve created to clean us and soothe our fears? How does ‘satisficing’ converge with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and become more than the sum of their parts for the contemporary individual?

October 2022

Screenings: Pop-up: Screendance Showing Fall ’22