Output details

Passing Strange and Wonderful

Passing Strange and Wonderful Portfolio

Using a recent live dance work as a starting point, (Passing Strange and Wonderful, Ben Wright) this practice-led research led to 3 outcomes:

a) Passing Strange and Wonderful (dir. M.Zanotti /chor. Ben Wright) Screendance:

DVD or private vimeo link https://vimeo.com/34653622 password cranes23

b) Article: Collaboration: Strange and Wonderful

c) Web App: (with bgroup) www.p-s-w.co.uk

The screendance work (same title as Wright’s choreography) Passing Strange and Wonderful explores a space between adaptation and documentation. The choreographic App (we understand this is the UKs first choreographic app) develops a tool for the exploration and expansion of intermedial practice. The related article questions interior directorial positions in screen documentation, dance notation and screendance (Bench, 2010) specifically in relation to corporeality, alongside an investigation of rendering corporeal presence on screen, attempting to position the film itself as a body.

The originating work, a duet, is performed by two casts and shot over 12 performances and rehearsal. The camera strategy adopts a trope of documentation by shooting these performances in unbroken takes (two hand-held). A condition is created for increased complexity of the choreographic screen narrative by following the live work’s narrative sequentially but remaining within the original duration. Through playing between the performances of individual dancers in the same phrase, and phasing in and out of unison across each screen, the dancers are strategically directed to ignore ideas of continuity for the camera. An attempt is made to draw attention to the specificity of each performance, and each dancer’s reading, therefore the choreography is presented as part of an unstable, dynamic system. The sound design is built from the complex manipulation of diagetic sound; both the editing and sound design strategy are set up to deliberately problematize a viewer’s affective experience of the dance through playing with disjunction.