I’m in the very early stages of making a music-dance film. I’m challenging myself to work outside of my typical media and communicate a vision for an artwork to collaborators working in different disciplines. Like so much of my work, this new music-dance film will explore memories and nostalgia—specifically the divergence that occurs when two individuals remembering the same event in different ways. Communicating across media seems to require distilling a concept down to its core ideas and then translating those core ideas into words that don’t involve specialized vocabulary.
Last week, I had the pleasure of doing a test shoot with my brilliant collaborators (dancers Bri George and Rachel Malehorn, and videographer Michael Marten) at Meltwater Studios. While Michael tweaked lighting and experimented with different (beautiful) vintage lenses, Rachel and Bri improvised on some loose ideas, which we gradually began to sculpt into something a bit more structured. I tried to avoid going into this test shoot with too many concrete goals, because I wanted to see what the other artists brought to the table. It was fascinating how quickly a vocabulary emerged over the course of a couple hours that all four of us could use to describe a new artwork and process that didn’t exist yet.
The test footage was too beautiful not to share, so I cut some of it together into a very short proof-of-concept piece I’m calling Sheltering. I used a previous AV Diary’s unstable glitch-chorale that (hopefully) compliments the fragmentary, nostalgic vision that I’m always chasing.