Focus

I  mentioned "focus" as one of the areas I would give attention to in my classes:

I suggest that you can consider your focus, where you look and what you are seeing, as another body part that can move out to connect you to a distant part of the space and which falls back into the body as light or information through the lens of the eye (refer to Lisa Nelson article "Before Your Eyes"). Here is where my work with video becomes the metaphor—softening or sharpening your focus affects the detail of the facial musculature, noticing how you can see from other angles and distances and considering how you are seen from all angles and in particular frames (i.e. not all the body at once). 

(Blog entry Three main areas of focus)

This week (week 8) I am introducing a "focus phrase" (to Nick Cave's Spell track). In it I am bringing attention to your vision as a kinetic phrase, to consider not just what you are seeing but the line, timing and quality of your vision as the choreography—the pathways through space, at different distances from you, and the shift of your focus from sharp to blurred. 

Because I am a screendance artist, I think about the dance material cinematically—

• imagining seeing landscapes or other locations rather than the studio walls (I pan from the ocean/horizon to the cliff I am standing on as I look from forward-mid to right side mid)

• playing with timing as I would in the edit suite (a jump cut from the distance to the right, in to my R shoulder)

• activating the musculature around my eyes and considering the mechanics of my retina, lens, optic nerve like a camera as I play with softening or sharpening my focus (zooming in slowly on my fingers as I draw them from outstretched arm in to my eye)

Faldinghurst

My 2015 screendance Faldinghurst is a re-visioning of vision. I wanted to remind the viewer of the screendance how “seeing” feels. Through a cinematic play with focus, depth of field, I believed it possible to affect the viewer’s physicality—encouraging adjustments in your optic mechanism and the muscles around the eyes through visual shifts across space and plane, from foreground to background, left to right, down to up, pulling the viewer in and out of the frame. I was looking to upset the viewer’s balance, to shift their relationship to gravity and expand possibilities for “seeing”—to consider ‘the physicality of perception—the way we feel ourselves in the present’ (Dove 2006: 64).

The Faldinghurst experiment proceeded in this way. Firstly, I asked dancer Gülsen Özer if I could make a film with her at her farm residence in the hills on the outskirts of Melbourne. I asked her partly because I wanted to continue the connection that I had set up in the 2014 practice sessions at St Johns hall,155 and partly because I wanted to have a new screendance to submit to the Light Moves Festival156 by the end of May. But mostly I asked her because (besides needing a body other than mine) she has a capacity to fill a stillness, to inhabit her body attentively before the moment of impulse. She also has access to this geographic location—a landscape promising spatial depth, texture, autumnal colours, rural artifacts, and the traces of a culture lost or remote. She and I both understand that dancing the location is a way to understand it, decode it, inscribe it, and that ‘movement is a translation of space’ (Deleuze 1986: 8).I also wanted to see how my research, this improvisational practice, might be effecting my screendance practice—a development I was also tracing, sharing during my 2014 field trip.157 The score I gave Gülsen was about occupying the frame, attending to the relation between us, as dancer and camera, a shared passing of time and noticing of sensations...temperature, moisture, terrain, frames, textures, traces. The score I worked with was to find frames that satisfy my aesthetic158 and then play with the edges of these points of view—geometrically (composition within frame, negative/positive space, planes/lines of movement) and viscerally (moving in and out of focus within shot to expand and contract the focal length in the viewer’s eye and to physically effect the musculature around the eyes).

 (extract from my PhD thesis)