screendance

Gently Attuned is a 3.5-minute screendance duet that softly emanates, exchanges, and releases energy between two dancers. Balletic choreographies of transfer and reciprocal influence embody the emotionally potent language of care. The dancers offer kindness and echo one another through touch and intention, to make visible the powerful impact of subtle care for others.

We become better people and know ourselves more deeply through seemingly minuscule moments of compassion. The tender glance or touch of another provides comfort and aids healing. So too does embodying positive intentions and appreciation for those we love and the world at large, as we all mutually uplift and honor each other.’Gently Attuned’ reminds the viewer that their own loving kindness is meaningful and important to others.

Created April 2023

This project was made possible through the production and technical support of the Movement Lab in the Milstien Center of Barnard College.

Screened with live performance and installation as part of Performance Arts Course at the Undergraduate Arts Showcase in May 2023.

Disco Ball Funeral is a 7.5 minute film about the death of a romanticized, personified Disco Ball. A murder mystery, the process of uncovering the truth about Disco Ball’s death is emotionally chaotic, like any good funeral. Since his burial was improper, this piece serves as the synchreses of many different memorials that honor his life through sculpture, sound, movement, and ritual. In his physical absence, the film does not dote on his shiny aesthetics. Instead, the meaning of his life is captured through memories of Disco Ball shared in interviews, video footage of his funeral, and photographic memories from his life, alongside interpretive dance and narration that avenges his demise.

Disco Ball’s reflective and refractive nature, and his creative and connective reciprocity, guide the film’s thematic motifs that explore relationality. He is more than the sum of his audience of friends, through time-transcendent glimmers. Cliche filmmaking styles such as vlogging, public parodies, and collage are satirically employed to comment on humanity’s obsessive materiality and the cognitive dissonance of romantic idealism, particularly within patriarchal norms. Additionally, this piece is imbued with deeper meanings exploring loss, blame, insecurity, justice, closure, and memorialization through this emotionally charged mission to reckon with Disco Ball’s death, at the hands of male violence.

Created April 2023. This project was made possible thanks to the Movement Lab in the Milstein Center of Barnard College.

This short video, Catch Up, is an exploration of synchresis — the juxtaposition of multimedia elements — in an audio ethnography that calls upon soundscape, voice, body, and memory. Here, hazy dance is mixed with montaged snippets of audio collected in Paris, France, such as voice journals and other site-specific field-recordings from the urban environment.

The essay below brings this work into conversation with ideas outlined in the book Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, a French composer, film theorist, and scholar renowned for his pioneering work on the relationship between sound and image in cinema.

Chion’s ‘image of language,’ and the meaning of language as places where the brain first goes, point towards a great chasm between the effable and ineffable, as shaped by our perception of it. The relationships between dancing, music, technology, improvisation, and ethnography are of particular interest – how the spatial, temporal, and emotional relationships between these happenings change the nature of the art. It is a synchresis happening on and offscreen, between senses, timelines, and physical locations, in spatiotemporal reimaginations.

Dance is deeply ephemeral, and the kinesthetic empathy that intertwines performers and audiences is predominately somatic. Yet, the image of dance involves a translation of content’s meanings into choreographic form, in a similar way to language. I think dance has powerful potential as a language that is more fit for understanding ourselves and existence. The body can make spatial and visual occupations that are more fully engaging linguistic networks to live within, a physicality that can still ‘fill chambers’ like echoing words. Further, ‘the body’ itself is at once a gigantic eye, ear, and instrument, amongst other things, which allows ‘the body’ to uniquely swim in the aforementioned chasm separating language and the ineffable. These things come to mind as I think in conversation with Chion’s ideas of the ‘eye as more spatial, and ear as more temporal.’ The poetics of visual microrhythms, and the (irr)reversibility of image and sound, compels me to create at the intersections between technology and magic.

 Perhaps it is compelling to creatively explore how Chion’s ‘synchresis’ manifests between nuanced modes of being: What happens when we “rediscover” gustatorial, proprioceptive, vestibular, etc. senses in connective ways? Here I am compelled towards technology’s ‘recordability’ to bring to life the ‘extrasensory perceptions’ of the magician, toward exploring how infinite immersions, both nurtured and innate, that are synchresistic. What underlying truths can be revealed from synchresis? Which combinations of sensory inputs are seemingly forged from nothingness/randomness, which are uncannily juxtaposed, and which feel even more innate (and satisfying) than the original sound-image relationship itself? This conceptual grounding both emerges from and extends the multiplicities of realities that interweave through our perception.

Technology can also supplant the original divide between mediums, instead of bringing them together supplementally. As Chion discusses regarding horror films — sometimes when sound and image give different information, the composite (reciprocity of added value) feeds a newness back onto itself. For example, when one records oneself dancing to music, it is most helpful to watch back the video silently, so that the flow of music doesn’t supplant itself onto, and thus obscure, the image of dance. I think of the predominance of silent dances and dance films in the postmodern era, so that sound doesn’t alter movement or perception, and ‘the body’s’ artistic merit can standalone.  Thus, to emulate the organic workings of perception and technology, Catch Up is a deliberate stimulation of senses through synchresis: where kinesthetic empathy, ethnographic memory, and linguistic form emerge from the blend of ‘the dancing image’ and atmospheric sounds. The temporal poetics of memory are enacted through the forms of fragmentation, repetition, fading, blurring, and restructuring of visual and audio, set to evoke the auric buzz of Paris.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.

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