CANVAS

Canvas is a composition process of shared artistic agency. From the conceptual idea to the moment the paint hit the canvas to the unpredictable movement of materials, gravity, and choice-making, individual artists played in making their paintings.  Physical thinking, knowing, and becoming emerge through the interwoven intra-actions of bodily production toward the entangled material practice phenomena.  This is the materialization of a choreographic process through an interdisciplinary approach.  Investigating the fullness of materiality of both visual art and bodies.  Reconfiguring the possibilities of what “can be” through discursive practice engaging in an agential realist approach.    

I see this work as the painting coming to life, the dancers as paint, shifting grounds on the canvas, and then finding a place to settle.  The ability to manipulate the film's color, texture, and angles allowed me, as the editor, to show the audience pieces of the in-between.  At times, I may have altered the audience's view when they did not want it to be displaced from the sunrise. There may have been moments when opacity was distracting. This was editorial choice-making.  In the end, the dancers settle on the screen, just as paint does on the canvas. 

I relished the entire process from beginning to end.  Making the paintings, reflecting on them, developing movement in relation to the painting, expanding upon that movement, and then sculpting it together in ensemble work.  It was truly a Practice-led Research journey, needing to know where the destination was going.  I thought we would film in a studio with masks on due to Covid.  One of the dancers suggested sunrise, and it was beautiful to capture the movement during this time as the colors of dawn are ever-shifting, just like a flow painting.  We only had one shot facing the beach.  Under the circumstances of Covid and dancers being quarantined, the only day everyone was in the studio the same day was the day we made the paintings.  Filming the work on the beach was the first time the dancers danced together through the entire process.  In retrospect, I would have liked to have more rehearsals. In reality, this was the day the universe had arranged to materialize our spacetimemattering.