Page 45 - radio strainer

Mist-translations (artist-book and video work)
The mangle of film making
The video-work Mt Fuji is a choreography composed of falling shadow figures moving toward and away from Italian and Japanese voices. It begins with the voices reading individually, and develops until the voices become an overlapping cacophony. Shadow bodies overlap and reconfigure. Bodies of light merge and distil, sometimes one body, sometimes many. Their gestures begin with an evocation of
writing that slowly expands out into choreographies of space and distance.
This film came into being because the space that we had intended to work in, a large black box theatre, was unavailable. Instead, our Director of Photography Jeffrey Holdaway sug- gested we go for a white space – an empty lecture theatre at the art school, a space with a sunken stage and multiple stairways and levels. Our intention was to film the dancers working through the improvisation scores that formed a section of the live work. On reaching the loca- tion we worked in relation to the architecture of the space, factoring it in to all our decisions about time, perspective, dynamic, and framing. But when we began, Jeffrey’s eye was drawn more to the shadows on the wall than to the material bodies of the dancers. So he did a cou- ple of shadow-takes, the dancers out of shot, bodies literally formed by light and shade. When we came to reviewing and editing our material, this chance material turned out to be all the film needed, and the material we shot based on our expectations was redundant. Our work emerged in chance discovery. This is the magic of mangling, when the material circumstances of the process
generate stuff more alive and more satisfying than intention, design or imagination.
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