Four Choreographic Experiments, Seoul Dance Center
In 2022, I was invited to participate in Seoul Dance Center’s fall program Co-Choreo Lab, where choreographers were given space and stipend to hold interdisciplinary interventions. Due to the pandemic, showings were canceled. This led me to work in Handmade Film Lab Space cell founded by filmmaker Jangwook Lee and managed by performance artist Eunjung Kim. I designed four choreographic experiments involving a Bolex Camera, Go-pro camera, an iPad, and an iPhone. Two dancers, a sound technician, and a photographer participated in ‘games’ or ‘scores’ that involved use of cameras as silent spectators/voyeurs or as dancers-actors. The process was documented by Haeun Roh in these photographs.
The footage from the performances were made into this video-essay Spectacle in 2023,
where I pay homage to Yvonne Rainer and Mette Ingvartsen who said “no” and “yes” to spectacle respectively.
The First Experiment
‘I designed a game play that reauired planning and effort.
The design was for participants to ultimately fail, to let our rhythm of failures emmerge:
1. Measuring
II. Installing
III. Throwing
The Second Experiment
The second experiment designed around scores for rolling each other led to visualizing time and negative space through 16mm black and white film.
In the ‘splicing’ of the film, which involved manually cutting the film into pieces and taping them together with Scotch tape I decided to select the footage that contained negative space and discard footage with body parts flying by. How might the negative space dance in the unit of of 24 frames per second?