To Dance a Landscape

November from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

November is a film I made in collaboration with dancer Jung Woong Kim of U-Turn Dance Company. This is about as spontaneous as filmmaking can get. Jung Woong and I just met one day at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, walked around looking for suitable settings, and then filmed Jung Woong’s improvisations in the moment.

Most dance video makers nowadays seem to rely heavily on editing, choreographing by assembling moments of movement. Our approach, by contrast, was to find settings that would provide a frame or field of play, keeping the camera fixed and allowing mostly uninterrupted movement to sketch the spatial potential of the topology.

There is no music, but the crunching and swishing of dry autumn leaves becomes a complex rhythmic composition. The urban aspect of the setting is expressed through the auditory environment, which includes aircraft, traffic, and distant voices.

Before the advent of high definition video, this kind of mise en scène approach required 35mm film. This video was made with a humble Canon HV20 (with wide angle adapter and external microphone), but the detail is sufficient to show texture and atmospheric depth in a long shot, which conveys a great deal about a dancer’s exploration of the possibilities of a natural space.

If your computer can handle high definition video, check out the HD version on Vimeo.

Here are three still frames from the video:

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

http://planetcity1.wordpress.com planetcity1

Nicely done
Liag

I think this is interesting in many ways, Fred. One thing that struck me especially is that although he is physically interacting with his surroundings in a very involved manner, he is also NOT interacting with his surroundings. It isn’t so much that he chooses what to interact with as much as it is that he chooses what not to interact with. As I watch it for a second time, I see this quality from the very beginning, but of course, it is very evident when he is by the water. It’s also evident in the difference between what his body does and what his face does. I like it!

http://www.fredhatt.com/blog/ fred

The fact that he doesn’t look at the swans makes the swans look choreographed, doesn’t it!

I like the way there is always some kind of frame, emphasizing the two-dimensional, pictorial aspect of the image, but that the movement within the frame emphasizes spatial depth. And Jung Woong keeps playing with the contrast between movement and stillness.

drawing life