oneandthesame
Choreographer & Performer: Deanne Butterworth
Sound Design and Video Editing: Michael Munson
Completed at the end of summer, March 2009
A result of a 30 hour Summer Space Grant from Dancehouse
During this period of working I had a specific thought for working with the idea of ‘newness’- finding something new to work with, defining that moment and then trying to work with a new approach. This is what I thought I wanted to do before I started in the studio. Then, I realised that I really wanted to make something more concrete- not just play around with a selection of ideas and allow them to linger so that they be developed into another project sometime in the future. I did not want to ‘set up’ a toolbox for working that I was able to draw from and use later, but I wanted to provide some evidence of what I had been doing, similar to the idea of exposing a process. So, I filmed everything. I decided not to judge myself with what I was doing and I decided to do less, to have less ideas on each visit to the studio and commit to really exploring what I had started in the first few rehearsals. It became a reduction of dance material.
It was summer. The grant of space was for the summertime and there was a lightness and playfulness to the working period. The light is different in each studio and I wanted to play with ideas of light and space and how much it can shift- how you see something depending on your point of view and where you are situated.
I started playing with looping. This initially came from a conversation with the sound designer, Michael Munson. How loops happen in sound and how those correspond to movement loops. Around this time I also watched (again but with a 10 year gap since the last viewing) the 1978 Trisha Brown work, ‘Water Motor’ filmed by Babette Mangolte. I liked the idea of a fixed camera, the grainy image and the simplicity of location reducing the image to a dancer in space. None of what I started to do was new and I did not set out to emulate ‘Water Motor’ but I wanted to try to understand how something was perceived by seeing it again and again.
So I developed two sets of accumulations developed from a moment of intending to NOT set-up an accumulation. From here we started to play around with approaching the filming of them from a rather mathematical point rather than a sensory one. Finding the centre point, measuring the space along each radius so that each time the camera was the same distant from the action. Perception had nothing to do with it at this stage as I was stripping away my judgement and understanding that it should work mathematically. In the process of doing this I discovered a lot about the actual moving- watching and re-watching those tapes exposed habits with movements and rhythm. At this point we decided to create a video with the material. I was really happy to hand over to Michael the accumulations and the filmed improvisations as ‘material’- finding a way to remove myself from them and view them as things that could be processed, edited, reconfigured and altered to distort and enhance the reality.
The video above is one version of a few videos made. It is a selection of moody moments that sat alongside one another to reveal repetition, momentum, motion, captured flashes between the motions, stillness, humour and dancing. The first thing shown was one of the first things made and the last moments of shifting light shot in the upstairs space were the final minutes in the 30 hours. The sound disappears, the fans can be heard and then the camera switches off and the 30 hours are over.
The video consists of four different segments, shot in the main spaces of Dancehouse. Once we had decided to make this a video project, the accumulation shot at 5 different angles became the framework on which the project was built. We began thinking about using similar processes of accumulation and looping in the dance, sound and video editing. We followed this process until we came to edit the video at which point decisions were made about what to keep and what to lose. The end result developed from all of these ideas but in the end it was to be a video and therefore had to work in this format.
Four episodes
1 downstairs dark – accumulation thinking about early scientific film studies of movement in the body – The click track is taken from the song in episode 3. The first part was inspired by early scientific footage of movement and has a click track
2 downstairs dark – accumulation with sharp edits and slow motion – the music loop is from a tiny sample taken from the song in episode 3. The loop is played against itself and then phased.
3 upstairs light– improvised piece that is about viewing an intimate moment of dream – the dreamy pop song is by the band Beach House and I had their CD playing most of the time during the 30 hours.