Dear Emily
VIDEO | MFA Thesis Project
Hands emerge uncannily from behind elements of the bright plastic set, bearing lines of an Emily Dickinson poem. The surreal grace of the hands belie the difficult choreographic precision required to produce this video as a solo effort. (Like Emily, I labored alone in a garret for this production.) Earlier, more earnest attempts to build the set resulted in failure—a goofy pastiche of the antique and the natural. Dickinson’s style may be antiquated, but her words and sentiments continue to evoke and arrest. I wanted to capture the spirit of her poem without fossilizing it. By building a stage exclusively from garish plastic representations of nature and setting the poem in blasé snippets of Helvetica, the video became a juxtaposition of the contemporary and the historical, the natural and the artificial. Daniel Lanois’ electronically-skewed guitar music—Two Worlds from his album Belladonna—drifts in the background, intertwining with the sound of crickets. I wished to give voice to the poem’s playful sweetness and simultaneous deep melancholy. Over 100 years later, our relationship to nature remains fraught, arguably even more so. (My own tender judgment.)
Hands emerge uncannily from behind elements of the bright plastic set, bearing lines of an Emily Dickinson poem. The surreal grace of the hands belie the difficult choreographic precision required to produce this video as a solo effort. (Like Emily, I labored alone in a garret for this production.) Earlier, more earnest attempts to build the set resulted in failure—a goofy pastiche of the antique and the natural. Dickinson’s style may be antiquated, but her words and sentiments continue to evoke and arrest. I wanted to capture the spirit of her poem without fossilizing it. By building a stage exclusively from garish plastic representations of nature and setting the poem in blasé snippets of Helvetica, the video became a juxtaposition of the contemporary and the historical, the natural and the artificial. Daniel Lanois’ electronically-skewed guitar music—Two Worlds from his album Belladonna—drifts in the background, intertwining with the sound of crickets. I wished to give voice to the poem’s playful sweetness and simultaneous deep melancholy. Over 100 years later, our relationship to nature remains fraught, arguably even more so. (My own tender judgment.)