Blog 1

[Kate Hunsicker]

http://www.dance-tech.net/video/15-steps

http://www.dance-tech.net/video/this-is-concrete-by-thiago-granato-...

The video that I chose to look at was called 15 steps, and was very interesting because of all the combined effects instead of the just the choreography alone. The movement by itself was very simplistic and repetitive. There was a lot of stillness, and by itself, would probably have been pretty boring to watch. The elements of lighting, sound, and camera angles combined with the simple movement, however, created a very interesting video.

The piece was about decision-making, and choosing a direction in situations. The dancer wore a black dress against a black background, and followed an arrow of light around the stage. Eventually, the arrow of light developed into the arrow plus white lines of light making patterns and appearing and disappearing all over the stage.

The camera changed angles many times, and created a lot of cool views that an audience member in a live performance would not get to have. At one point, the camera is at a bird's eye perspective directly above the dancer. Because of that, we get to see the pattern of the lines on the stage whereas if you were watching from an audience seat, you wouldn't see what the light lines actually looked like. It was necessary for this dance to be a dance film project, because technology and views were needed to understand the concept that are not available to the regular observer in an audience.

With very intricate choreography and all of these effects, the visual outcome would have been overwhelming. The simplicity of the piece is beautiful and clean looking, and allows the viewer to take in the light and create an impression about the meaning. My only question is about the light. I am wondering if the lights were projected on the actual floor while she was dancing and being recorded, or if they were edited in later. Both seem like hard things to achieve, but I would be interested to know how they did that.

The second piece that I watched was very different from 15 steps. It was called This is Concrete and instead of a solo it was a duet between two men. They were dressed in gray clothing and dancing to a techno beat. The movement seemed to be in slow motion and first and was mostly very flowy, body ripple sort of dancing. As the music sped up and increased into a stronger beat, their dancing changed into more individual, fast, movements on the floor which reminded me more of a hip-hop style.

The camera angle in this video didn't really change as much as it did in 15 steps. It started with a side view, then moved to a front view, and then at one point cut to a closer up view of the dancers when the music changed. Though at one point there was a shot from above, I think that this dance could have been viewed from an audience perspective without losing too much meaning.

This dance also made use of light, but in a simpler way than the 15 steps video. In This is Concrete, it started out with a big white spot light and darkness everywhere else. Then when the music change happens, the camera angle changes and the light switches to two green spots moving about the stage. The key thing with these lights was that the dancers stayed fairly stationary so you only caught glimpses of what they were doing when the lights washed over them, which I thought was interesting.

As for similarities, both videos had a fairly grayscale color scheme, made use of the bird's-eye camera perspective, and used distinct lighting choices to enhance the choreography and videography. But as I stated before, 15 steps was more of a dance for the camera project than was This is Concrete.