The editing process has had particularly intense periods of absorption and immersion with movements of screen. I’ve been alone in my quiet studio without disturbance. I have felt the presence and ‘sense’ of the screen and the dancers as I’ve been choreographing their movements on screen.
Once I had the clips exported to the right format, I played Sigur Rós’s album Valtari (2012) to get into the immersive zone in my mind. It has always felt haunting, with the sustained chords and Jonsi’s etheral vocals. I knew it would create a similar trancelike state and likely to help me be more absorbed in the process of working through and roughly assembling potential clips to use.
In the next stage of producing rough cuts, I have been listening to the soundtrack Hannah created for me and experimenting with semi-abstract images of moving body parts on screen in darkened tones, as a metaphor for internal and potentially altered states of consciousness. I wanted the movements and the body to be less figuratively moving in and out of focus, extreme-close-ups, appearing and disappearing limbs to give a sense of fleeting images in the mind, creating a ghostly sense of presence.
The edits so far feel really beautiful. Sometimes I smile as I watch the playbacks and at times I feel as if I’m lifted, merged with what I see on screen. My body is mostly still, sometimes my hands, my torso, my head lift, sway spontaneously, but it feels like all my cells are in movement with the screen, with the performers, such an utterly immersed sensation in my body and mind, distance between my body and screen seems to vanish. As if my body is floating, weightless. I feel the sense of being with the action on screen, not as an observer but in a sense of fusion and merging with the limbs on screen as they move in trancelike slow motion to music.
I want to draw lines and experiment moving them with the bodies on screen, an outline, a metaphor of a shadowing, tangible vs ethereal, a line that is solid, a metaphor for something corporeal or the sense of ‘other’, in line/parallel with the body’s movement. Which is the body and which is the mind? Perhaps neither, both are mediated, existing only on screen, the body of screen. I can’t touch them but I can feel the sensation of touch in my body/mind. One performer touches the other and I am not just a witness, I am the hand/skin/limb that touches and is touched. The strangest reality! Being the witness and the witnessed. It is a ”becoming’, a peak-experience in the state of flow.
The work feels trancelike, there is a physical sensation of transcendence in my body as well as in my mind.
Experiments so far:
https://vimeo.com/769106467/21706f82e8
https://vimeo.com/769584276/18ef76eac5
https://vimeo.com/773343052/504fcbc2a6