Monday, December 22, 2008

Falling into Perfection



This dance performance was choreographed by Dianna Ross and featured Joseph Pikalek and Kersten Stuart. The performance was part of a larger project produced by Janice Rocke at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur California.

The project was very multilayered and art oriented. The essential idea that I was attempting to convey had to do with what I termed as “de- fragmentation,” which is not a real word, but, to me essentially meant “putting together the fragmented parts of a more valuable whole.”
I began my project by collecting filmed imagery and patterns including, but not limited to, flowers, tides, bones, rocks, paint swirls in a painting, pipes, and anything else that I thought was interesting. My next step was to build a backdrop. In my back yard, I assembled a variety of driftwood, redwood slabs, mirrors, empty picture frames, a few other unusual and/or interesting items and hollow core doors, which I had painted green and blue,. My idea was that I would replace the areas of green and blue with the video taped images and patterns that I had been collecting to create a collage of visual imagery. Afterward, an artist friend and I built structures from recycled materials and old paintings of ours in front of the backdrop. I videotaped us doing so. I combined clips of our work with other short scenes to make little mini films. The mini films were then shown on screens inside the structures that we built. The structures were then set up for the event at Henry Miller Library amidst another collage background of green and blue hollow core doors, redwood slabs, driftwood, mirrors etc. I hired musicians and a group of dancers to perform throughout the day of the event. The dancers wore masks and drifted nonchalantly though the crown instead of being on a center stage area. I also hired two other camera people beside myself to film the various goings-on at this event. Finally, I edited the footage from the event together with the short films that played on the little screens
inside the assemblages. The result was a 15 minute sensually textured montage of wistful imagery that would probably not appeal to the average soul, but involved a lot of hard work, creativity and organization to produce. I did all of this with very little money.