Medium Specificity - Movement Illustrated

My first ballet instructor used to tell us stories of how, as a child, she would practice her barre work in the dirt and how her movement became visible. Dance is about lines. In ballet there are specific degrees and lines you must create to achieve correct form. Often times these lines are created through movement and are essentially invisible. They also require a great amount of strength to hold, strength that translates to bold, powerful movements. For this project I wanted to showcase these qualities in an effort to celebrate the balance of grace and power ballet requires by finding the lines created by movement, and making them visible.

            I was originally inspired by reflecting on the choreographed battles in Zhang Yimou’s film Hero, especially Flying Snow’s battle amount the leaves. The leaves become a visual tool as they also swirl around the women’s movement, creating a way for the lines drawn by her sword work to be seen in a new, artful way. 

I wanted to accomplish something similar, but on a less grand scale. I choose paint as my tool to express my medium for its bright colors and its ability to visibly react to pressure. Additionally, an unanticipated upside was the layering quality paint possesses.  While these qualities drew me towards using paint, it was still only a tool used to showcase my true medium, the dancing. I could have easily chosen charcoal or mud to get similar effects.

            Classical ballet is an art form that strives to achieve the illusion of weightlessness and ease. While a dancer may look like she floats through the air, the impact she has is carefully controlled punch to the ground. It is a heavy and powerful sport that aims to appear light. Martha Graham said, “Nothing is more revealing than movement” and I wanted to represent this idea in my project. The lines are continually informed the weight and controlled power of the dancer. This is visible on the finished canvas through the hard, bold lines created by the most forceful gestures and the distinct prints and tracks made in the paint from walking on point. The weight of the dancer caused the paint to be pushed away from areas of impact and the these interactions reveal otherwise overlooked properties of dance.

            Like Scott McCloud’s discussion on form and content in Understanding Comics addresses, there is more than one flavor to an art form. Although the classical ballet might have created the clearest lines, I decided early on to direct my dancer to incorporated modern elements into the choreography. Ballet is one ‘flavor’ of dance and I wanted to expand our palate for this experiment. As I directed my dancer through the process I also experimented with different ways of getting the paint on paper. Sometimes placing paint where I wanted her to move, and sometimes following her lead. This way there were a variety of movements represented and both classic lines and broken lines became visible.