Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown
If you emerge from a hot tub or shower into the cold night, you may see rivulets of steam rising from your skin. If the environment is dark and a light source illuminates the steam from behind, you can see it clearly. A runner on a chilly morning may also generate steam from the body, but it’s usually difficult to see in daylight.
Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown
My longtime friend and collaborator, Corinna Hiller Brown, a butoh dancer and movement therapist, had the idea of trying to capture this effect on video, combined with trancelike butoh dance. On a snowy winter night in 2005, in my studio in Brooklyn, we turned off the heat, opened all the windows and doors, and pulled a box fan out of off-season storage, trying to get the room as cold as possible. Corinna repeatedly got in and out of a hot shower, so when she entered the chilly studio her skin would steam for a couple of minutes – just enough to get a quick take. Later that same night, I filmed the snowflakes eddying under the street lamps outside.
There was no way to assemble the fragments of dance into a connected choreography, but the slow downward drift of the snow through shifting currents of air worked well as a transitional element, echoing in reverse the movement of the glowing steam curling up from the warm skin. The first, simple edit of this material was used as a projection element with “My Love Bleeds Fire”, a choreographed piece that Corinna premiered at the Cool New York Dance Festival at White Wave.
Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown
Seven years later, I’ve finally completed a version of the video that I feel stands alone as a piece of poetic cinema. For the soundtrack, multi-instrumentalist Gregory Reynolds created a jangly droning sound with swelling bass notes, which I mixed with recordings I’d made of ocean surf and rain.
Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown
For me, the film is a vision of the warmth of life in the cold world. I described it thus: “The body is a slow flame, a campfire in the snow, a star in the vastness of space, a pulsing heart in the ocean.” Every living being is a kind of fire. Metabolism is combustion. Life force is like a flame, cohering as long as it consumes experience, adhering to the body as a candle flame clings to its wick. The heart and mind of a sentient being give warmth and light into the world.
Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown
The title, “Inner Heat”, refers to a traditional Tibetan meditation practice called tummo. A combination of breathing exercises and highly focused visualizations can produce enough heat in the body to survive in the snows of the Himalayas. This is more than just legendary tantric magic, as Harvard researchers have documented the ability of experienced tummo practitioners to produce striking changes in body heat and other supposedly autonomic bodily functions.
Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown
I suggest viewing this video as a meditation. Give yourself over to the waves of slow movement and feel the warmth generating within your own belly and heart, and be a source of light in the darkness. The video is embedded below (except in the email subscription version of the blog), or click the link to see “Inner Heat” on my Vimeo page.
