Reviewer One
Inspired idea for an interdisciplinary piece of work. The relationships between art, dance and music/music performance were very genuine, subtle yet confident. Creatively edited visuals work very well and add to the experience. Exaggerated gestures of the musicians combined with almost geometric full body expression of the dancer, connect around the theme of sharp angles and curves. Presence of the Restrictions/Affordances theme is clear. The ideas seem well executed and the work ‘speaks for itself’ (there was no need to read the description).
Reviewer Two
Relevance to Symposium Theme: The relevance to the symposium theme as stated in the description is a little tenuous, stating that one of the restrictions was that a piano wasn’t available at the venue, when a keyboard is clearly in view on the film. Obviously this is not an equivalent to an acoustic piano but nevertheless other options were available. It’s not clear from the film what restriction the “idiosyncratic layout” imposed and therefore not obvious what the issue would have been in including live musicians. This submission does however raise interesting questions about how creative work is conceived and then documented and the fact that, as in this case, a creative space opens up when a straight forward recording of the piece is not possible because of restrictions imposed by the performance environment. In this case, although the overall production values aren’t especially high, the picture-in-picture format worked reasonably well.
How Well The Piece Works: The piece and it’s performance is of high quality and this film almost certainly doesn’t do justice to the experience of witnessing the work in situ. It’s clear that the piece has been modified and adjusted to meet the affordances of the performance space and as such this film does a reasonable job of communicating this aspect of the work.