Circle 1-Yujie
Posted: March 24, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »My final project is to collaborate with my dancer Yukina who is working on a restaging project. She is going to restage Japanese contemporary choreographer Saeko Ichinohe’s piece and then create her own piece responding to Ichinohe’s work. I’m working with her to create the mediation for her own choreography.
We center our project around one question that is derived from Yukina’s own lived experience. Why people in the US expect her, a Japanese woman, to perform and embody Japanese cultural elements on stage. I’m inspired by Rachel Lee’s book The Exquisite Corpse of Asian American. Lee thinks that certain Asian American artists use fragmented body parts to resist the idea of returning to the whole which represents the so-called cultural essence. The whole is also easily to be categorized into racial stereotypes. The fragmented body parts then can be seen as a challenge.
In my circle 1, I use live camera to capture dancer’s body parts and frame it in discrete space on the projection. I also use Isadora to capture the performance in real time and juxtaposition the recording with the real-time performance. Dancers’ body is not just divided in space but also in time. Then, I use video effects to present dancer’s inner state. In the end, I try to put all the fragmented body parts randomly together, but it was not successful in this circle.
Here is one scene in Isadora:
Here is the video documentation of my circle 1:
For my circle 2, I’m thinking of the following development:
- Use two cameras to free my laptop. Work on camera angles to really get close to the dancers’ body
- Develop a version of the surrealist game that invite a more dynamic participation from the audience. I might consider adding the Kinect to include the audience’s motion, so that they are not just gaze into the dancer’s body.
- Consider more possibilities of the projection. I want to try different ways to devise the space with the projection.