From Earth

United Kingdom, 2022

Official Selection - Lichfield Screendance Festival 2022
Official Selection - Videopark Contemporary Art Festival 2022
Official Selection - First-Time Filmmaker Sessions Pinewood Studios 2022

About the Work

From Earth is a screendance short exploring the human experience of connection to the ground. How does the Earth support and lift the body? The ground is our biggest support and basis for how we orient ourselves in space. Instead of fighting against gravity, can the Earth initiate pathways of upward lift through the body? What does it mean to feel supported by the ground we walk on, and trust that this support is always there? Does it change how we feel, move, and interact with the space around us? The movement that came from investigating these ideas became the basis for the film.

Martha Graham's technique can be viewed as the result of a huge volume of research she undertook using her own body and with those of her students. I was struck by the absolute conviction she had in her work, and this became a point of departure for my own research where I hoped to find out something true for my body. I was inspired by Graham's notion of contraction and release, whereby the architectural geometry of the body is resultant from an internal impulse, initiating from the pelvis. I was interested by how the body's internal resistance to the floor could result in skeletal and muscular movement. My improvisations explored how the body resists the floor, how resistance supports the body, and how engaging with the floor initiates and alters movement. I documented my findings from this experimental process by creating a two-minute film.

I found that to engage truthfully with the process, I needed to remain open and available to what might emerge during the investigations. "It is that openness and awareness and innocence of sorts that I try to cultivate in my dancers… it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with." (Graham, 2004, p. 69). To 'draw out' what was working and what to take forward at each stage, I experimented with being open to possibilities. Being open to how the resistance of the floor might alter the body also taught me something about trusting the creative process where I had to be sensitive to what was happening to allow the next step to emerge. Nurturing this kind of attitude has helped me uncover some insights in my bodily experience of dancing, and of my creative practice in filmmaking, which I will share in closer detail.

I applied concepts from Graham's technique to my body's relationship with the floor. I embarked on a process of experimentation by asking different questions as prompts for my improvisations, such as, 'how do the feet resist the floor and how does this resistance travel through the body?' Engaging in these improvisations added a depth to my experience of the body which was new for me, and helped me understand Graham's work in a more nuanced way. Melanie Clarke, when speaking about Graham's contraction, explains that, "this lifting within the movement is important, so that, even though there is a strong connection to the floor, the movement does not give in to the ground but resists it and springs off from it. As Frieda Flier, a dancer in the Graham company from 1936 to 1941, describes: 'You didn't fall on the floor, you bounced. You were resisting the floor'40 (2020, p. 60). By putting attention in my feet on the floor and playing with degrees of force to push against it, I felt my other limbs engage even though they were not directly contacting the floor. I was aware of a subtle path of engagement through the centre of the body connecting my upper limbs and head to my feet. The recoil of force away from the floor up through the body felt natural rather experiencing uprightness as holding up the body in a fight against gravity. It felt like there was a route of connection between them and the floor, along which movement could occur. I started to glimpse how the body can move from that upward push instead of from my cognitive intention, and this is an exploration I would like to spend more time with to integrate into my experience.

As my improvisations developed, I went on to explore how resisting the floor with different body parts catalysed movement and changed its quality, finding that it felt more connected through the spine. Clarke goes on to say, "the pelvis is weighted, as it is the primary support of the body on the floor, but there is a feeling of an upward energy from the primary initiation in the base of the pelvis. The lumbar spine lengthens into flexion as the pelvis tips posteriorly, and as the diaphragm lifts, energy travels upwards to the heart and chest" (2020, p. 60). I found that other parts of the body; feet, hands, the back, could also be initiators of this feeling of upward energy through their resistance to the floor. By changing the primary support of the body, I explored how there be different pathways for upward lift. I could feel how the spine, being the central axis of the body, distributes force and resistance through to other limbs. The space around those limbs became more alive and fuller in my perception, and something that I could push against as a further initiator of movement. This experience of engaging with the floor has opened up a new way for my body to feel and moves which has been a significant shift for my dance practice.

Through the filmic process I endeavoured to share something of the visceral experience of the body with my camera work. Through experimenting with different shots including holding the camera while dancing, I learned that curating what the audience sees through shot choice can go beyond sharing the internal experience of the dancer but can also articulate beyond what is revealed by the body. It can communicate an intimacy with the nuance of what is going on inside the body, to add a further dimension to the movement. This became increasingly clear for me when moving with the camera, inspired by Nikolai's 'camera-dancer'. Nikolai explains how "these nuances are experienced by the dancer in the intimate, shared space of the improvisation. The close-up allows the fellow improviser as well as spectators to engage with micro-choreography, and invites a focused respect for the micro–the nuance, the slow breath–unheard, to be seen" (2016, p. 139). In the case of my exploration, the micro / nuance relates to internal process of resisting the floor and allowing the upward lift to cause the movement. Using the close-up helped to intimately show the internal feeling of the movement, and the moving camera clarified the movement of energy through the body as the camera could follow different parts of the body that were activating in sequence. Although I captured a lot of this material, only certain shots were successful in showing the flow of energy up from the floor through body that were incorporated into the final film, so that including these shots became a purposeful choice.

Holding the camera changed how I moved. While dancing, I became hyperaware of the micro-movements of my body and I began to make creative choices about what to capture with the camera, which changed the quality of the movement content. Through experimenting in this way, the process generated a 'camera-consciousness' whereby the camera moved beyond a descriptive function and into a subjective agent. Nikolai speaks about interplay between the subjective and objective created by dancing with the camera; "the indiscernibility between the subjective and objective, which "endow the camera with a rich array of functions"…this speaks to the interchange between subjective and objective perspectives proposed by the camera-dancer"(Nikolai, 2016, p. 140). During the improvisation, I was aware of my roles as the subject of the film and objective viewer of the movement, and of the camera adding in a third perspective. By dancing between the objective and subjective, further unexpected possibilities were revealed which I could not have planned. This experience helped me develop a deeper understanding of creative camera work that I can engage with in the future.

During this research process, I attempted to find out something about how the body resists the floor and how this resistance initiates and alters movement. This process has impacted my bodily experience of dancing. My improvisations generated new a understanding of how my body can feel an upward resistance from the floor and how my limbs can feel connected through pathways of this resistance to support movement. Like these connected pathways within the body, I worked to find a creative pathway through the process that could be expressed through a final film. Taking inspiration from Nikolai, my experimentations gave me new tools to understand and participate in camera work. Experimenting in this way brought up additional questions such as how to authentically engage in an improvisational task knowing that it is being recorded. This paralleled the challenge I engaged with during this research as an experimental process; the challenge to remain open without judgement and develop this as a skill which can be used intentionally at different stages of the creative process. This is something that I started to do and will certainly be attempting to develop as a key part of my practice going forwards.

References