It's About Time: Site on film through somatic-digital approaches

Conference: BAFTSS Conference

Dates: 7-9 April 2021

Abstract:

Somatic-digital approaches provide a unique, hybrid, visceral opportunity to express a site through and of time. The body in space collaborates with the land itself: devising onsite, drawing on materiality and immateriality of site to construct a piece based on a perceived sense of temporality, or ‘site time’. This paper will explore how duel time based disciplines of choreography and directing fuse to form a film where more conventional forms of narrative construction and character development recede, allowing for ‘screen space’. The film is then, a somatic expression of ‘site time’. How both disciplines use time within the realm of screendance will be explored, specifically in terms of reception. How can themes of time reflex in expanded cinematic live and recorded encounters?

Through referring to early cinema and land art as well as leading theorist-practitioners including Rosenberg, Tuffnell and Arlander, I will debate how the body and site collaborate, leaning in to time, shaping the response: the pace, proximity, gesture, texture and choreographic intention.

Source: Manual