Maeve is very engaged and enthusiastic to collaborate together again. We both feel very at ease to work and collaborate on some creative experiments. I would like our collaboration to be much more intimate during filming, not as two separate art forms, but as a single ‘entangled’ ‘enkinaesthetic’ practice.
We met on 6 and 23 December 2024 to plan the next series of works. We had planned to film in the Black Mountain in Belfast on the second day but bad weather changes our plans and instead we met to further discuss and plan the project.
Maeve was also very keen on the idea of a series of experiments over several months, instead of a final polished film. She was happy with the idea of experimenting with improvised as well as choreographed set of movements in different settings.
I shared with Maeve the following plan for the next series of creative experiments:
I want to explore peak-flow experience in embodied filmmaking Screendance with possibly some animation/motion graphics in some experiments.
I’m focusing especially on sensory experiences as Thresholds, ‘transfiguration of the senses’, ‘Deleuze and Parent’s ‘third line’, and sensory responses in the body in naked form (flesh/skin):
Thresholds (Deleuze, parnet reference to Kelist’s 1810 essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, to describe the ‘third line’as “more strange: as if something carries us away, across our segments, but also across our threshold, towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent,… this line has something exceeding mysterious. It is nothing other than the progression of the soul of the dancer…”, (Deleuze, Parnet, 1987/2007: 124-125) – I hope to explore this also in puppetry inspired choreographic responses
John O’Donohue’s phrase ‘Transfigurations of the senses‘ in his book Anam Cara (1996) in which he describes “The body as mirror of the soul”, “the senses as thresholds of the soul” “Your senses are the guides to take you deep into the inner world of your heart… The senses are our bridges to the world. Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in.”) – We will explore this as chorecinematic responses to nature and man-made materials: sea/mountains/trees etc. and plastic/fabric etc
I intend to experiment with:
- Using my semi-pro video camera and DSLR
- Tripod vs no tripod
- Single continued shots vs multi-shots
- Shooting the same movement from different angles: lie down aa she dances over me, move/not move the camera
- Improvised vs rehearsed
- Slow movement vs fast movement (whirling dervish/frantic – Using music or text to inspire the movements, ie. Sufi/Rumi passages for hypnotic whirling and disturbing sound or dark poetry about fear/terror
- Minute movement: ie. film a single body part and changes in movement by introducing sensory responses to various stimuli and textures, temperature
- Movement in the whole body vs movement in single body part
- Abstraction of the body vs fully visible/decipherable body parts
- Choreographic drawing/painting: dancer makes marks with chalk/charcoal and marks appear on her body and clothing (Yves Klein, Caroline Denervaud)
- Maeve dancing with her own silhouette
- Small constricted space vs vast space/ limitations
- With vs without animation
- Human presence vs absence of performer (dancerly movement of natural elements or man-made i.e. fabric, plastic, etc)
- Same choreographed movement in different settings: indoor with professional lighting/without, outdoor rural/urban
- Editing: highly edited/hardly edited, colour/BW
- With music/natural sounds/no sound
How do these choreocinematic processes affect my (and dance-artist’s) peak-flow states?