David & Christina: Week 15

Christina and David’s update

We had a nice post-holiday catch up this week - after spending quite a while in this residency looking at the interesting pieces and ingredients we have, I think it’s becoming clear to us how all the pieces fit together.

David was sharing with me more about the new composition he has been working on, using the idea of moving from upstream to downstream that he has written about before.  He chose to focus on the Susquehanna watershed - even though I don’t live quite in this catchment area, it’s a major watershed that connects Pennsylvania with downstream Maryland and DC, where David lives, and is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Choosing a particular geography to focus on has helped me anchor myself conceptually as to the places we’re focused on, which will help me to develop movement in a more place oriented way.

I am also getting really excited to hear David’s composition.  I think the way he has chosen to suss out the characteristics of a river - interpreting slope into musical tempo and land cover into volume and harmony/dissonance - will help to tell a really interesting story of this watershed. So a small, forested, mountain stream in the headwaters will present as a fast-paced, yet quiet and harmonious musical phrase, while when the river gets flat and wide in downstream urban areas, the composition will be slower, louder, and more dissonant.

What I plan to work on now is developing some core movement motifs reflecting on the Susquehanna River that can be varied according to how the musical composition is fluctuating in response to the music. My first thought was to have the dancer(s) move more quickly when the speed of the music changes, make their movement larger or smaller depending on the volume, and have more fluid, curved gestures and pathways in the forested areas but more angular ones in the urbanized ones - I may stick with this or think about other ways to vary the movement in response to the same parameters that David’s composition is doing.

Below David shares some map screenshots that visually depict the qualities of the Susquehanna watershed that we’ll interpret through music and dance.
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We also discussed using 360 video. Though this video concept may take some time to go from recording to 360 video, we think that this will enhance our 2D-to-3D theme to have varying level of interactivity. Here are some examples of 360 video in nature and in dance.

360 Video of Redwoods:

360 Kyle Hanagami Choreography: