The Choreographic Camera. María Ferrara
How can the film language of music video clips, the dramaturgical structure of online series, the immediacy of Instagram and Facebook stories, the search-engine function of YouTube and follower marketing strategies be used, twisted and bent to catapult contemporary dance to a new relationship with the audience?
With the DIS-TANZ-SOLO grant I set off on this research by making short videos with my choreographies.
In July I choreographed my first music video ever for the single “Fade Away” in Dyan Valdés’s upcoming solo-debut album “Stand”, with direction by Jess Sweetman and cinematography by Polina Georgescu. I discovered that I wasn’t the only choreographer in the project. The camera choreographs the viewer’s gaze and also shapes the space and the time.
Until now, the videos of my performances were meant as documentation and were frontal and static subproducts. In TADANZFLIX I want the end product to engage video audiences, so I need to give cinematography the freedom to do what it can do. I need to co-choreograph with the camera (which for now will also be me, with all my limitations). I am following the online course “Artistic Direction for Music Videos” and I have started re-choreographing a fragment out of “The Show of Small Things”. The process is allowing me to recover ideas that I had to leave out of the stage version.
The first task that I had to do in the course was prepare a script for the video. This was a revelation. Notice that I say “prepare” and not “write”. More is soon to come!
