Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of South Wales
On Vocation
This site-specific research project, made in collaboration with performer Jodie Allinson, is one of several outputs produced as part of "In and Between‟ a creative-critical cross disciplinary research project, funded by the University of South Wales. It was selected for Whirly Gig, a screening event run by Making Tracks and The Cabinet of Living Cinema (CLC) in October 2012, and was presented at Con-soleing Passions Conference, De Montfort University, June 2013.
The practice element of the project investigated interactions between body and landscape through the media of theatre and moving image. Extending our prior studio experiments into translating the visceral in performance into the screen aesthetics, we chose a site-specific context to further our explorations into performance for camera.
The devising process gave rise to the creation of simple performance actions, lines of navigation across the coastal terrain, the final destination of each journey forever outside of the frame. Visualising "being‟, exposed to coastal elements, was of greater interest to both performer and filmmaker than seeing a body doing in a scenic landscape. The research is in dialogue with the work of video artists, Bill Viola (1951) and Aernout Mik (1962) who capture the simplest of body motions under the camera's controlling scrutiny, in slow motion (BV) and in "moving stills‟ (AM) as a means of conveying complex psycho-social experiences. As the filmmaker, the first question I asked was: how might the elements of landscape, performance, "constructive camera‟ (MacDougall), and the editing process, be manipulated to evoke the metaphysical in moving image form? The second related question was: how might the metaphysical be articulated in the performer's corporeal presence in the landscape?
In choosing to work with a three-channel format, a consequential question arose: how might tension be generated and controlled between three frames of screen space, given the absence of storytelling devices to mobilize viewer attention?
