A LAST SONNET

From an early age the focus of my life has been as a choreographer of live dance performance. Since 2000 I have been making dance films shot in southwestern France. My most recent film “A Last Sonnet” was shot in Venice. While making this film I found that choreographic techniques looked incongruous in whatever settings I chose. Venice is such a strong presence that it seemed to reject imposed dance styles and aesthetics—or “dance” as we think of it. Any effort on my part to mix Venice with dance did not work for this particular film. So I began to think of dance in a broader context. I discovered that the act of walking with presence could be regarded as a dance in itself —the dance of the presence of Being without pre-conceived style or form. After the film was shot, the cinematographer and I worked together as a duet in the editing process “choreographing” the footage as I would choreograph a dance. We paid close attention to the rhythm and flow of the imagery, the transitions between images, integrating the music and the spoken poem so that all the elements interacted in a way that made choreographic sense.

Several years ago when I and my performer and poet husband Paul Oertel (who is featured in the film) were in Venice he wrote a sonnet in Shakespearean form inspired by the tides that washed in and out of the city, by the water’s ubiquitous reflections, and by the ancient, fading stone buildings that arose from the water. As the sole and solitary figure in the film I directed him to walk in a manner that was in no way formal, stylized or pedestrian but rather with a sense of total presence to create a dreamlike, heightened reality.

The structure of the film is based on the idea of timelessness and enduring presence; that beyond life and death, beyond time, beyond beginnings and endings there is an eternal thread. I wanted to capture in concrete imagery this ephemeral and invisible essence.

The research for the film began in 2019 and was supported by a grant from the Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice/New York) for the initial research of locating sites and doing some preliminary trial filming. The actual shoot was scheduled for 2020. Covid hit in March and the shoot was aborted until 2024. By then Venice had changed in some respects so that many of the original chosen locations were no longer usable due to construction and other alterations. So I had to search for other sites. During the shoot I also experienced other unexpected challenges such as an unusually massive influx of tourists, making it very difficult to get shots with only the solo figure; also the spring weather turned very cold and rainy which affected the shoot and limited the days and times we could film.

Orchestrating movement for “A Last Sonnet” has allowed me to find a new balance between film, dance and spoken poetry that has opened up new creative possibilities. The journey of making “A Last Sonnet” has been a rich voyage for me into this relationship between dance, poetry and film.