Screendance

Awaken

performance Matthew Blake
editing Danilo Herrera
score Sam Kudman

camera Danilo Herrera | Octavio Hingle-Wesbster
sound Sam Kudman | Chad Khan

This screendance is a journey of interactions between a moving body and the environment. The audience is invited to experiment, along with the individual on the screen, different textures and sensations in an undefined place, which gradually becomes a backdrop of multiple sensorial discoveries.

The viewer is presented with a metaphor of birth.

Almost like a newborn, the being crawls from the shore to the land, from liquid to solid, from the womb to the world… this bridge reflects on his trajectory through the space, which is built as one of unearthing and uncovering. As a consequence, two levels of interaction are developed, one micro and another macro. In the small-scale, there is an extensive tactile experimentation. In the large-scale, there is an intense search for a sense of spaciousness.

At the same time, the being finds strange most of what he sees. Such strangeness adds to the fact that he comes out of nowhere to this unknown land. We never know where he comes from. We are offered the limited fact that someone was found by the shore. Under this perspective, the individual almost looks like an alien, a being that comes to a planet where his spirit fuels from the findings of the land. In this sense, his body movements reflect the progress of his discoveries.

The movements increase in pace and fluidity as the individual becomes more acquainted with his surroundings.

As the individual’s body becomes increasingly activated by the different textures, shapes and elements of the environment, he also activates the different spaces found by him. The nature remains intact until the being starts moving around in the space. It looks pristine without him. But, unlike the usual (bad) outcome from nature-human relations, this interaction makes the environment look even more pristine.

Nature and being come together in a genuine bond.

In the end, we cannot tell if the setting has become his habitat, but it definitely has worked as a milieu of discoveries. Through his path, the individual experiments the solid and the liquid, the grainy and the soft. And his body deals in a different way with each texture. Or, should I say, each texture deals in a different way with his body? Regardless of who triggers the interaction, the encounter results in a beautiful, bonding relationship.

From start to end, the individual awakens every inch of the environment. And every inch of the environment awakens the individual’s body.

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