Creating a piece that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, all under a minute seems like a simple task but it is not. When it was mentioned in class that we needed to create a piece in less than a minute, I figured I will just be dancing till it’s a minute, then “tadaaaa” end of the piece but it turned out to be quite different. The minute of dancing should fulfill a viewer because the piece had a beginning and an end.
I had tons of ideas rushing through my head and they were all screaming “pick me, pick me”, but I wanted to be able to do something that will be relevant to my research. I initially started putting together random movements, but I did not like what I had so I scratched that out. It had very fast movements and I wanted to have an all fast movement piece to be my less than a minute piece. It must be the fast movements under a minute that threw me off because they seemed rushed and I was not getting the feel I anticipated.
Earlier in the semester, I was tasked to shoot 22 shots using two separate movements in my dance film 1 class. My MFA colleague, Jackie Courchene was also in the dance film class, so we decided to perform for each other (I’ll dance in her video and she’ll dance in mine). I created 2 movements which she beautifully embodied and we had a great shoot. I decided to have several dancers perform those same two movements to experiment on how each person will embody the movement. Initially, I planned to use this as my group project because I will have several dancers in the piece, but plans changed, and I settled to make that my less than 1-minute project. I spoke to a few ladies in class and they all agreed to help me with the piece. These ladies are Eboni Edwards, Aya Venet, and Naiya Sayavong. We see each other every day of the week because we are all in the same contemporary and African dance classes. That allowed me to always remind them of our shoot because we all had busy schedules. I finally settled on sending them a video of Jackie performing the movements, so they learn at their own time and pace and that worked for everyone. I was able to shoot the videos of Aya and Eboni after class but Naiya had packed days that week, so it was not possible. With the help of Eboni briefing her on the angles that I needed, she found a friend to shoot her part and transferred the footage to me when we met in class. The music I used is a live performance of “Feeling Alright” by Rebelution and it was perfect. This is one of the projects that I enjoyed working on and I hope to develop the movements further and have a lot more people perform them. Attached to this blog is the video to the piece.
The Creative Process 