weeks 4,5,6 - making a film
hello readers,
this writing has been adapted from three assignments smushed into one. this post is a documentation of grad school and a documentation of creating the dance film, "far from the 掛包: a memoir of reintegration" which will premier at the Chicago Cultural Center on October 16th
This writing is a bit all over the place but I enjoyed recounting how I got to a 'final' product.
Assignment 1 - Deke Weaver: Assignment 02: ROUTINE, MYTH, and BREAK
This performance should include four things:
01: Routine and/or ritual.
02: Myth.
03: The breaking of the routine.
04: A fucked-up mask that you make with your own hot little hands.
the video of this performance is a bit too long for my phone storage and i'm having issue uploading. . . stay tuned. basically I recreated a classroom in Taiwan and laid out pictures I had bought from an antique store in taipei as I put on my grandma auntie sun hood.I greeted the class as if we were on Zoom using language like "ugh i wish we could be together, this is all just so crazy, hang in there guys we will be back to normal soon". I retaught the class how to say phonics ST and SP with lots of repetition and taking time at some points to glitch and pause for awkward amounts of time. Then used the same principal to relearn USA as "ooh suh" and GAY BAR as "Heaven". The piece ended with me closing out fake tabs with a computer mouse that was trailing me from my pocket during the entire performance
DANC 520 Land as Pedagogy Synthesis Project
Distill something from the last 4 weeks and make something new with it and/or design something to do with the class that is in response to the last 4 weeks. Teach, show, read, discuss, eat, move. You select an approach from your own expertise and share it with us a practice of synthesis.
DANC 541 Week 5 Response
We've begun by looking at the way the archival can function as a personal/cultural memoir, a compositional strategy of "collecting" and "arranging," and also the possibility of the body itself as a performing archive.
"Nora" by Nora Chipaumire
"Untrained" (2009) by Lucy Guerin
Jennifer Monson's "Live Dancing Archive"
Share your written reflections on these works and themes here. As always, it can be as formal or informal as feels generative.
dance as archive, phone as archive, digital performance as archive:
i think of this one performance/video/choreography that i saw during COVID lockdown a lot. . . it is archiving a digital platform (Grindr) and a choreography of the phone screen (digital cruising), it archives a cultural language and way of navigating gay sex and the internet, And! it is an archive of white supremacy in our world; how it exists in our dating and fucking and real life and virtual. it feels honest.
The phone as an archive reminds me that wherever I've been so has this insane teeny pocket-supercomputer.
Since covid, the world has moved so bizarrely, time is insane and i feel insane for still being bogged down by what i feel is an oppressive desire to return to normal. My phone keeps me grounded in the memory that this is insane. For good and bad. And my prediction is: the phone archive will forever be a way to access this cultural moment.
I made this next video to archive the past week. Week 5 of grad school: chaotic, unorganized, messy, queer. Being in constant development of what I'm trying to do here is confusing! I’m grateful to have so much time and support to figure things out but it feels crazy these days.
Is it a legible video? No, I don't think so. Is it an archive for me? Yes absolutely. Does it hold potential for reproduction? I think it does, because it is more in-line with what I want to produce for Elevate Chicago Dance 2k22 than the Synthesis project.
When experimenting with video i title my files:
[title].final
[title].final-final
[title].finalfinalfinalUSETHISONE
[title].ONETRUEFINAL
It's almost nonsensical at some point, but the archive of “what I believed was the final draft” is one that I really treasure. The archive of saying,
“ok this is enough for today, this worked, i'm going to save this so that i don't lose this edit, i'm going to archive this in case another experiment goes horribly wrong and makes this version unsalvageable, i can return here”
Experimentation Video Archive I made that i thought was finished:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_FQMNFjBk8_Aizfk41pXj75eyufOHu4a/view?usp=sharing
Experimentation Video Part 2 that I made and now I'm sure it’s not finished but it is informing the work I have due in 4 days!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PReRcFdpe-ysXd1GwtOshu8BE4dipj5y/view?usp=sharing
(included in this video is a spoken breakdown of how I created the synthesis video for Jmon/Serouj’s class)
I think Everyone is in grief right now. I'm not sure how to make work for an audience in grief, for a nation, and world that is grieving.
I have been grieving a normalcy that can never return by searching for something that will make me breathe a sigh of relief, that all is well, that I can relax, and that hole that is in my heart can be full again. But, I don't think grief works that way. The hole in my heart is something, someone, some time that is gone, and I need to live around it, build around it, dance around it, but I need to stop expecting it to go away. What if I committed to being here, with new people, who aren't replacements of the past but ways to walk, head held high, into the future. . . it does not dishonor the past and it makes carrying it a little easier. What if my walking and strutting and dancing and moving into the future is also to music I was moving to in Kaohsiung Quarantine, or in the caves of Kinmen, or on the beach with friends who have passed.
The Instagram videos I made during my time in Taiwan were highly visible and legible archive. Capitalizing on nostalgia, freedom from COVID, and the wonderment from Taiwan, these videos were my interaction with the world, archival of the world, and choreography. And with this new dance video "far from the 掛包: a memoir of reintegration," (a title I stole from David Wojnarowicz's memoir) my mission is this:
to expand upon the work I've developed in my bedroom during; quarantine and my time in Taiwan. I investigate American midwestern aesthetics of queer-ness, asian-ness, mixed-ness, and movement. The film's visual and metaphorical language is steeped in perspective gained from two years teaching English and dance on remote taiwanese islands, Kinmen and Penghu. A work of self-documentary-autobiographical-fiction, that uses the internet as a compass back to living in the United States and specifically Illinois.
Sunday, October 16, 10:00am - 1:00pm
Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.
Streaming on Twitch
other dance happening:
October Dance at The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. (I am the understudy for Sojung Lim's work Two Chairs.) Streaming and Live
CODED LANGUAGE Serouj Aprahamian
DICK AND JANES Sara Hook
UNTIED Roxane D’Orleans Juste
TWO CHAIRS Sojung Lim
UN RECUERDO Alfonso Cervera
Chelsea Film Festival. I met Dahsir during a Vim Vigor Company intensive this summer at the University of Michigan. A wonderful friend and a star on the rise!
xoxo
goob