outline
Anamnesis is a screendance (dance film) project initiated by Simon Ellis (direction, performance) with collaborators Cormac Lally (videography/editing), David Corbet (sound), and Bagryana Popov (choreography, dramaturgy).
The following outline of Anamnesis is written as a film ‘treatment’.
Anamnesis visits the volatility of memory within the mind of an elderly woman. We see her face - weathered, broken, cold, close – and her hands. We see her speaking, and hear her words. They describe another time, of youth and fertility, of health, and possibility. Within these words is a man dancing. He is poeticised, an other, brought into this televisual world by the contrasting presence of the elderly woman. We do not know their relationship, but that he is her son is implied. Her words frame the figurative and abstract visual world, and act as a means of holding it in the audience’s everyday sensations and awarenesses. His actions and body are visible but distorted, and they draw the film into an alternate and increasingly ambiguous mise en scene.
Visually, the movement/dance material is fluid, in which the physical action follows clear and direct lines through and across the body. The camera tracks across, with and against these lines of movement, establishing proximity to and an awareness of the fragility of this amniotic dancing human. The textures of these contrasting presences – elderly woman, and interior man – are cohered via a digital sonic environment that is developed in parallel to the video editing process.
The danced footage is heavily treated in post-production to the extent that the choreography begins to take on characteristics of an ultrasound, of an internal and profoundly enclosed environment; an intimate and supra-natural viewing. This technique was developed ad hoc by Cormac Lally as part of the Inert shoot and development in 2005, and acts as the starting point for the development, production and feel of Anamnesis.
Anamnesis will be about 14 minutes long. It will be shot within a black space environment (Dancehouse, Melbourne) on high-definition video.
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