Illustrations in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, I have recently read, influenced the following digital line drawings exploring the portrayal of movement and sexuality in dance.
My interpretation of ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’ performed in Salome. Due to isolation I could not have a physical performance of the dance and thus used recorded imagery to create an animation wherein I could experiment with features. I used footage from cheerleading – hyper-sexualised performers – like Salome’s dance. Fine line and monochrome influenced by Beardsley’s illustrations.
Isobel Davies, Cheerleading: The Seven Veils, 2020, Digital Animation, 1620 x 2160px.
When reading, Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion, this quote:
“Dance is one of these metaphysical tracings of human artifacts. It exists through the dancer and for the time being“
Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 2004) p.22.
resonated with my interests in dance as a presentation of motion and emotional expression, exploring personal engagement between space and body. The idea of ‘tracings’, I explored through the internal layering in my animations, where the frames that make the animation can be seen within one another. I find that this reflects the internalised experience of dance.
I used bold colours to emphasise the multiple layers to express this internalised motion in another animation.
Upon researching dance, art and layering I found this video. I really like the use of transparent frames as a way to layer and this led to the following animations.
My interest in layering directed me to Laure Prouvost’s video art. I like her use of related and unrelated layers and thus experimented with layering audio from my Sonic Interventions Fieldwork sessions. Layering also became apparent when watching an interview with Elizabeth Price.
Upon researching Prouvost and Price’s work I created two pieces – experimenting with their styles and methods.
When creating Price Experiment, I used much of the audio which I had been experimenting with in my fieldwork sessions. These sessions explored the natural sounds, industrial and human sounds. I liked how these interacted and decided to experiment with the idea of natural, or intuitional dance (which relates the Fraleigh’s theory on dance ‘existing through’ the dancer) in opposition to the performative and COVID-implemented digitalisation of dance in 2020.
The video footage of the dancer was set in nature already, I continued to use a mixture of nature and human sounds and imagery to show this opposition alongside digital text.
Submission for Winter Cabaret: Connectivité
The cabaret’s title: Connectivité – elated to my work through my exploration of layering, and the connection between the body, dance and space. Connectivité also related to the current pandemic which also related to my use of digitalisation to reflect the current issues with dance, which has to continue through online platforms highlight the actual distance between dancers.
The final session of my fieldwork resulted in a presentation under reading train station where we played our audio to create a Sonic Intervention. I used audio from my video work – however I was really interested by my peers piece. It was a confessional piece consisting of her voice expressing her feelings towards loneliness. I found this really interesting and made me want to explore how my fellow dancers felt. This was enhanced by the artist talk with Adelita Husni-Bey.
After the Finish Line, influenced my decision to create a questionnaire to explore university of reading cheerleaders perspectives on cheerleading -similarly to those featured in Husni-Bey’s piece.
Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays, 1979, Lithograph on Paper, Tate collection. <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/holzer-no-title-p77384> [accessed on 30 November 2020]
When looking at the responses to the questionnaire I started accumulating the answers and created seven scripts. I intuitively colour coded them and this made me re-visit Holzer’s Inflammatory essays. I decided to present the scripts in the same colour palette and mode. I feel this palette’s aesthetic nature reflects many of the issues of ‘prettiness’ which were raised in the questionnaire.
I would have liked to explore presenting these as large pieces. However looking at Price’s exhibition of Felt Tip on a large column. This makes me want to experiment with projection. I feel projecting these would allow them to take up the rooms space.
When considering my peers confessional sound art and After the finish line I decided to create an audio of cheerleaders reading these scripts. I made include on of our male cheerleaders to highlight the female dominance alongside the inherent homophobia associated with the stereotypes.
Experimenting with video to present this influenced my decision to create a video piece reflecting the perspectives on cheerleading and cheerleaders.
I started a story board as I listened to the voice overs. I allowed the audio to direct the footage in relation to Husni-Bey’s videos which are concerned with the subjects narrating their own stories. The audios follow a pattern of: personal perspective before joining cheerleading, societal expectations/perspectives on cheerleading, perspectives where these societal ideas affected them, realities of a cheerleader. This reflects a journey of insight as well as reflects the dual perspectives on being a cheerleader.
This dual-reality made me decide to mix animation with real footage and media footage – to present the multiple ideas around what/who cheerleaders are.
Here I am experimenting as before with animation to distort this image. This reflects a moment of expectation for the cheerleaders as to what they wished to gain in cheerleading. I found that the black background adds to this displacement of reality, aiding the surrealism. I chose this footage due to its ‘cult’ like circling movement – which equally reflects the societal perspective of the cheerleader ‘clique’ as portrayed as a trope in films.
IDAVIESART 