Solos
Research Project Description
Solos is a physical theatre film created during lockdown about the difficulties of maintaining creativity and how syllogism in isolation looks like.
Joe is in the UK and Devina is on the other end of Europe in Bulgaria. The physical distance of 2,510 km between them gave birth to the concept – a virtual dance piece about travel, isolation and friendship that exists only in the virtual realm of imagination.
Dance is about connection and touch, so naturally the touchstones of our virtual worlds are ourselves and our struggles with making work in the current climate - the only thing in physical reach when alone.
We based the aesthetic, choreography and music on how we deal with isolation: Devina, who struggles mentally, falls into a deep depression and attempting to crawl out of it, lands into creativity involuntarily, and Joe, who struggles with the physical aspect of isolation, such as claustrophobia and creative drought, attempts to reach the desired creativity mechanically and systematically.
This is a research into our mental health and coping mechanisms and their visual representation, using the feedback from a survey circulated through our peers on how they relate to ‘creativity in lockdown’. (Full information on this under Week 5 or the group of trees at the top of the MAP).
Research Questions
How can the body best communicate our experience with creativity during lockdown?
If this struggle was a world, how would it look like?
What does it look like to marry two imaginations? Colours? Objects? Lighting?
How does our mind refract the real world into the world of imagination sonically?
Research Methodologies
Due to the nature of our current climate, we decided to try and piece together this film and use the fact that it is difficult to work together online, as an advantage. We initially agreed on the basic frame, storyboard, themes, and choreographical styles but then took off our separate ways to further develop them.
The only time, when both of us saw what the other has done with the brief, was when we started the editing process of the footage. I believe this allowed us to be more flexible with the meaning-making process and be constantly revising and remodeling the piece, making this film an endless process of research. A similar process was applied when meeting up with the composer to devise the music, which was applied after we had filmed the footage, but not had yet edited it, to further the asynchronous feel of the space and time of the story and not accidentally double meaning-making elements.
Choreography-wise, we used the stimuli from a research survey (under week 5) and aimed to express it in the movements and mobility of my body, respectively choose which body parts to immobilize. This paved the way for selecting the locations of a desert and have it juxtaposed to water – drought verses creative flow.
Choreographing during a live conversation turned out to be very difficult, due my bad Wi-Fi connection, so instead we filmed ourselves and sent each other progress videos, which each of us learned the basic phrases, on which to them build on.
The Train:
For this section we tried to show, through music, picture and choreography, two tired people, gasping for air, stranded in a desert, on a train not knowing where they are going or where they’ll end up, just that they need to stay awake. This is why I chose the bending over movement that each of us adapted to their own body and internal rhythm. This became our method for most of the piece. The movement was to be repeated until my character couldn’t handle it any longer and ‘fall off’ the train. The method of repetition is commonly used by Pina Bausch, which is one of my case studies. I also tried to incorporate the desperate feel of all her choreographies – people fighting to be alive and awake.
The train was initially thought of as a ‘train of thought’, where both our characters meet to try and create together, but both end up fighting to stay awake. This and the finale are the only sections in the film when the two meet, having them being separated at the beginning. The music thus moves from disharmony, noise and unusual sounds to the finale, where it’s about harmony, a resolving of feelings and crawling out of the space of unproductiveness. The method applied to the devising of the choreography is to match this progression with both CGI and real-life dance footage.
Solo section:
As this is a piece about mental health, I wanted to use my struggles from the past year. I don’t have a problem that much with physical space, rather than my mother that I live with and my deteriorating mental health. Ironically, during this project, I felt the same feelings of isolation, imprisonment in my own mind and confusion of time and space. The 4-minute solo section was filmed with the idea of furthering the style of repetition from the train but playing more on time and space distortion, by filming on different locations throughout a prolonged period of time. The method is similar – one template movement, a contortion of the body, while laying down, then explored to its maximum. The aim was to portray a person ringing inside their head, having a bad dream, unable to distinguish reality from the anxiety pit they are situated in.
The finale is devised with the following phrases as stimuli for movement: a weight lifted, freedom of mobility and inspiration. The footage was then cut up in small sections and reorganized to further those stimuli.
The double ending and the increasing of flickering of raw green screen footage is to build up to this final break of illusion, only to return to it, as a place of pleasure, trying to say that creativity is where we want to stay, even though it is a tough journey to get there.
Evaluation
In this project nothing went as planned. All our previously set deadlines fell through. Then the technical difficulties arrived, which were expected, however, time became the biggest concern. At the end we pulled together a piece that none of us anticipated but I think, precisely for that reason, we managed to convey what it means to create digitally, during isolation, kilometres apart and stuffed again at home.
The choreography that we rehearsed and researched in the first months of our journey, even though believed to be small enough to fit a home-made greenscreen, were too big. Hands, legs, hair and other peripheral body parts always popped out the carefully placed boundaries, set for our lockdown creativity. But wherever there is limitation and struggle, there is a story.
The film might not have turned out the way both of us imagined, but it is the product of months of trying to figure out, not only what works best in terms of technology, but also what virtual artistic collaboration is, what is the new definition of rehearsal and how to make the best of our situations.
The choreography evolved even closer to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s methodology, having more and more separate elements that were to be repeated and variated, but rarely performed in a typical linear alignment. When editing the film, I had the possibility to remake, reorganize, reverse, retime segments, or parts of them, and make new movement. This method arrived in the latter month of our project and at first, I struggled with understanding how to plan such a thing but ended up being able to be given unrelated takes and build new sections from them, just by following the raw material. Cultivating this skill is an unexpected outcome.
In one of our calls with our mentor, Daniel Oliver, I was pleased to hear that Joe and I were able to choreograph/edit the film, incorporating the feeling of exhaustion, pain and struggle that Pina Bausch is renowned for, while simultaneously building a story about our inner selves, as guided by our shared case study, the dance film TOM by Wilkie Branson.
My work with Hristo Yordanov on the music of the bulk of the film was a curious exploration of a style of music that in everyday life I am not particularly inclined to but found fitting for our story.
Now, I only hope that the audience will see the footprint of our real-life struggles with creativity in isolation on the theme of our work - creativity during lockdown and get on board our imaginations with us.