In the previous post, you read that all new projects were pending, as if frozen by bitterly cold temperatures. However, I did in fact manage to launch one right after the big snowstorm that froze everything in place.
Without further ado, here's the trailer:
Now for the ado. The magic ingredients were two wonderful dancers - Hsaio-Ju Tang and Shannon Yu - both of whom were strangers to me except as a fan of their dancing in recent performances. They were brave enough to allow me to "commission" them to work with me on a project. A three-day weekend was the only mutual free time they could carve out of their busy schedules. So that's what we did, sleeping at my house, rehearsing and shooting at the Nyack Boat Club nearby. We made movement material the first day, rehearsed with camera the 2nd, and shot the 3rd. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.
What did I know going into this? That it wouldn't be a major opus because we didn't have much time; that I thought of the dancers as superheroes; that it would be humorous rather than serious. I'd settled on a few royalty-free cuts from the online repertoire of Kevin MacLeod - whose work I first used 15 years ago for 890 Broadway. The music had just the pseudo-bombast I was looking for. The room at the boat club had a lovely wooden floor and big windows facing the (absolutely frozen) Hudson River. Unfortunately, neither the location nor the boat club look suited us thematically. So after an analog attempt to create an indoor set featuring flags that would echo the nautical flags outdoors, when it came to edit I turned to ... AI.
Yup, AI. It's the only time I expect to do so. In the past I've heartily foresworn slo-mo and other digital tricks (Ok, except in Thaw, where I used lots of dissolves, and in Dancing is an Old Friend where I was practically forced to exploit the pandemic era split screen.) In a serendipitous stroke of luck the editing platform I use - Premiere Pro - had just added a very user-friendly "object mask" which essentially allows for green screen after the fact. And Adobe Firefly offered a month's bargain on AI Generation - those too-false-to-be-true backgrounds seen above that substituted for the boat club.
My hope is that viewers will smile at the subject matter itself, and at the mail-order superhero mask/cape combo. But I'm also hoping that they'll recognize that the imperfect CGI is also a goof. It's a wannabe illusion from an OG practitioner who wants you to be conscious of two things going on: the actual live dancing of very particular humans warring for your attention with all of the generic and hypnotizing generated environments. Meta enough for you?
It's the 4th in a string of work I've made recently that might be considered "weird", "ambiguous", "personal", "wacky" = unprogrammable (with the exception of Inter Library Loan which is completely straightforward.) On the other hand, maybe my work has always been all of the above. At Dance Theater Workshop, in a 1990 concert of relatively conventional dances (and having recently given birth to my second son) I played as my theme song "Everything I do Gonh be Funky" by Lee Dorsey. Give it a listen.
And/or check out this video of the young choreographer / mother eager to present, defend, invite, connect (you'll probably want to raise the volume after the music stops.)
Still (more?) funky after all these years.
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