Carriageworks - Sydney - January 2008

Flying Falling Floating is a video installation focusing on meaning through performance and aesthetics. The project is a collaboration between dance, video and sound artists, working to create an architectural installation exploring difference and repetition in movement, and the way perception shapes our understanding of the world.

The resulting video work is a dreamy ‘otherworld’ -- ethereal and contemplative; a void in which bodies move in all the permutations of flying, falling and floating, eliciting the emotions associated with these movements – exhilaration, anxiety and tranquility.

In order to create an artwork that is more than just a recording of dance on video, a combination of physical and digital choreography is used in Flying Falling Floating to produce the illusion of bodies both defying and succumbing to gravity.

Essentially laying on the floor, each dancer was filmed individually with the camera situated above them. Since the dancers were literally ‘grounded’, the illusion of flying, falling and floating is all the more extraordinary – forced to move their bodies ‘naturally’ in the most unnatural of poses. The set was painstakingly lit, so that the black background could be used without any keying or chroma effects.

The core positions devised allowed for only small movements, often requiring both strength and a high level of control. The physical choreography, while very simple, was quite exhausting, adding an edge of emotional tension to the performances as nearly all the dancers were increasingly closer to physical collapse during each shot.

The footage of each dancer was then digitally composited, and re-choreographed to produce the final ensemble of movements. An essential component of the work is the way in which meaning is constructed through perception – while only two different types of movement are performed by each of the dancers, our understanding of what they are doing is shaped by our expectations and the variations in which these two movements are (re)presented in the video.

Placed in a formation and animated to move across the screen, our brains interpret flight in the dancers’ movements. However a simple rotation of 90 degrees, and the dancers appear to be ‘diving’ down into the depths of an ocean. Or, at times, we see a group of people floating across water, ‘wheeling’ and spinning in the current, but when the same physical movement is animated so that each of the dancers’ drops down from the top of the screen, suddenly we see struggle in their movements where before we saw peacefulness.

We interpret group action and individual movements as symbolic of ‘belonging’, ‘security’ and ’entrapment’ versus ‘freedom’, ‘insecurity’ and ’loneliness’. As such the video work creates a series of images for us to both project and reflect on in our understandings of the individual and the group and the way in which we move through the world – sometimes spinning out of control or just coasting along; sometimes soaring through life on a high, and sometimes tumbling down to the depths.

Director & Video Designer: Matthew Gingold
Sound Designer: Philippe Pasquier
Directory of Photography: Benjamin Hidalgo
Assistant DOP: Josh Burns
Producer: Laura Ainscough
Choreography: Laura Stitzel & Matthew Gingold
Make-Up: Cathy Cole & Carly Nancarrow
Dancers: Laura Stitzel, Alice Dixon, Atlanta Eke, Haruna Noda, Alicia Mitchell, Matt Cornell, Steven Whitty, Penny Chivas, Marcus Allemann, Tara Daniel, Rune Richarsdon Plasto, Meah Velik-Lord, Michael Hornblow, Derek Amanatidis

Special thanks to Dannielle Evans, Dario Vacirca, Emma McRae and Christie Stott for all their support in the development of this work.