Brief candle, walking shadow

A man walks into a church to gain a short respite from the tempest of the world outside. He prays to God for some sort of understanding to his current condition, and God responds -- in the form of fantastical dance, taking the man through a series of haunting visions that wake him up to life passing him by. Or perhaps he took a nap and had a series of psychedelic dreams. We will never know.

Such openness in interpretation is the nature of Brief Candle, Walking Shadow, a dance film exploring existential questions about human life and the anxiety surrounding our fragility through original choreography. This piece developed out of research questions related to the intersection of dance with theater and the intersection of dance with image. How can concert dance retain the elements of story and character, so fundamental to human experience, without becoming literal? How can the moving body be distilled to a series of images juxtaposed against each other to bring the viewer into a dream state as in a Surrealist painting?

With a large cast of diverse dancers, the choreography uses movement vocabulary from vernacular dances with classically trained performers to create unique movement languages as each scene reveals a different choreographic and thematic tone. The piece researches the digitally mediated body as a psychological phenomenon though the lens of film as the viewer follows the protagonist through a ritualized world of dreams.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.25820/jhnt-9129