A Solitude Quartet

A Solitude Quartet is an experimental dance film. Solitude, as the four creators are independent during the creation process without communication. Quartet, as the different stages of the film's production eventually create an unpredictable harmony or disharmony.

The concept of “following the material” encompasses the film. With self-contemplation and improvisation, the creators reflexively use the surrounding elements without communication or repetition. The performer translates the winter nature, thoughts and feelings into contemporary dance. The cinematographer captured the performance without giving instructions or feedback. The composer created pieces of music solely based on her imagination of “solitude” and the sampled sounds from the shooting scene. The editor used limited materials from other creators to make the final film with the freedom to combine or manipulate them.

While each creator possessed autonomy in making, still they were constantly compromising with the others. For instance, the performer may have complete creative freedom, but the movements may not be captured by the cinematographer as he intended; the film editor had all the power to decide the final film's appearance, but the materials depended on the other creators. With an unconventional and extreme way of making, A Solitude Quartet explores the inherent power imbalance in the film production system, questioning the hierarchy of the positions in standard collaborative work.

  • Kuo-Hao Li
    Creator
    Rabbit Hole
  • Dennis Alexander Schmitz
    Creator
  • An-Ni Wei
    Creator
    Rabbit Hole
  • Chen Wei
    Creator
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Other
  • Genres:
    Experimental, Dance, Film
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 44 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 11, 2023
  • Country of Filming:
    Germany
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography

This project took the approach without directors but four individual creators: An-Ni Wei, Kuo-Hao Li, and Wei Chen from Tawian, and Dennis Alexander Schmitz from Germany.

(Top left)
An-Ni Wei is a Taiwanese composer with a diverse educational background in classical and contemporary music. She studied in Boston and Taipei, where she was exposed to a range of musical styles, including chamber music, orchestral pieces, and experimental multimedia works.
An-Ni’s compositions encompass a variety of musical styles, including classical and contemporary music, real-time electroacoustic music, film music, and musical theatre. Her works centre around contemporary social issues, historic events, and folklore. In her works, she focuses on using sound, timbre, and harmonies to illustrate the colour, brightness and lightness of the pictures and stories in music to convey ideas through a musical expression that transcends words.

(Top Right)
Dennis Alexander Schmitz is a contemporary dancer, performer and choreographer from Germany. After studying contemporary dance/-pedagogy in Berlin, Vienna and Stockholm, he found his place in the free dance scene of Cologne. The main interest of his dance work and teaching lies in an ethical way towards each other, questioning power structures and making them transparent. His holistic approach to dance emphasizes each dancer's own inner driving forces and feelings to transform them into movement. The method being used is mostly score and improvisation based. The quality of dance that is found often comes along as primal, rough, disrupted and unpolished while being soft and delicate at the same time. For Schmitz, the source of what wants to be expressed as well as the way to channel this is much more important than the shape being created.

(Bottom left)
Kuo-Hao Li is an awarded filmmaker from Taiwan, with a passion for creating reflective and experimental content. With a background in film and media studies, discovered how diverse and romantic a film can be as a non-narrative or a storytelling form of art.
With a focus on experimental films, conventions such as norms of aesthetics and power structures of the system in the industry are often the main reflections of the works.

(Bottom right)
Wei Chen is a graphic designer and short film editor from Taiwan, with an education background in film study. As an expression and exploration of herself, the styles of the works are a mixture of extreme collisions. The designs often polarize from minimalism to maximalism; from saturated to colourless; from rough and unpolished to refined.

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