Feeling Sensing Filming: Workshop #1

Moving Image Research Lab presents: Masterclass Workshop
feeling, sensing, filming

Atelier #1: practical explorations in somatic listening
Feb. 20, 1:30-4:30pm
Presented though the SSHRC funded project “Anarchival Outbursts: Movement Practices of Post-Digital Cinema”, Professor Alanna Thain, McGill.

A new series at the intersection of the somatic + cinematic, Feeling: Sensing: Filming takes a research-creation approach to experimenting with filmmaking practices that understand embodiment as relational, ecological and ethico-aesthetical.

This practice based workshop brings together two artists working around questions of corporeal possessions and dispossessions, fabulation and documentary, dance practices and filmmaking. Participants should come prepared to engage in somatic and cinema exercises; wear comfortable clothing and please bring any device that you have that can be used for filming.

We will start with an artist talk via skype with Jatun Risba (London) on how a field research about Zar spirit possession rituals in Ethiopia brought the artist to develop a self-healing possession dance and a performance practice rooted in hyperawareness. This has included working with new forms of language and pronouns. Recently, ki has been living through a “kinship possession” that has been generating, on one side, a language of Terrestrial kinship. On the other, it created a new field of artistc research called ‘Life matters’.

The second part of the masterclass is a practice based movement workshop with filmmaker Ashley Duong . “Being able to react to the unexpected and to truly listen are two invaluable skills for filmmakers working with unscripted, real-life moments. This is less a pragmatic issue than an ethical and political one: if creating intimacy in film is about building trust and creating a shared language with documentary participants so that they are comfortable calling “cut,” then it is clear that these variegated levels of consent are founded on trust and close listening. But how can we as filmmakers foster these skills? I have actively sought out and developed techniques to nurture the improvisational “reflexes” required to sensitize oneself to verbal and nonverbal cues. In this practise-sharing masterclass, I invite attendees to participate in improvisational exercises from a variety of dance, martial arts, and acting practices which I have found particularly transferable to filmmaking. We will practice receiving haptic information through scores borrowed from contemporary dance, we will watch for somatic cues with an exercise adapted from martial arts, and we will practice listening to subtle cues through a Meisner acting game. Expect to feel, touch (safely, consensually), move, and to “get out of your head.” Afterwards, participants will be invited to discuss their experiences and we can explore the ways that somatic practices may help in the development of feminist and decolonizing filmmaking methods.”