Snow Song

In 2014, I directed a Summer Dance Festival in Homer, Alaska and invited guest choreographers from Homer, Anchorage, AK and New York City to showcase their work. The festival culminated in a performance that featured my piece "Nature's Walk." In the first "Nature's Walk," I incorporated footage of Alaska's wild natural beauty by projecting the images behind the dancers. The images motivated me to think about how I could use a different medium to integrate movement and alongside an opportunity to explore a new creative process.
"Snow Song" is an excerpt from the winter section of "Nature's Walk" in which I am re-imagining the original performance and fusing it into a modern dance video. I am excited to move dance out of the theater and into nature that inspired this work. With this project, a few of the elements I have been exploring are: light, color, and space in the different seasons in Alaska. In summer, the dancers wore red dresses to represent forest fires in color contrast with the deep green vibrancy of the forest. In "Snow Song," I experimented with the contrast of a tight knit group of movers against the expansiveness of the textured snow. As an underlying theme, I was exploring the idea of how the seasons represent the different stages of life. I chose dancers in their distinguished years for winter to juxtapose the young sojourner who dances through all four seasons. I am examining birth, growth, death and rebirth. I am interested in the intentional manipulation of time through the editing and post-production process. By exploring a new medium I am able to map bodies in nature and explore movements of those bodies in relation to the camera. I have been fortunate to work with an exceptional group of camera operators to help in this regard.
Lastly, but most importantly, in "Snow Song" and in the larger work "Nature's Walk," my purpose is to remind us to appreciate our natural surroundings and preserve our precious earth.