Video-Island

Abstract

This practice-based research focuses on the film Ínsula (Insular in English) to explore ways of conducting, intertwining, and assembling performing bodies with audio-visual performance, through the creation of original dispositifs. It expands relations between different types of performance with cinematographic methodology and unique approaches to editing, to suggest a new term, “cine-performance,” centered on the action and modification of the performing body by the cinematographic apparatus. Performance is an embodied intervention in the world, an instrument for assembling / disassembling territories and languages, a visual and sound composition of the cinematic apparatus. Cine-performance is an expressive potential of the multiple compositions between bodily and audio-visual performance. Through it, live performance is embodied in image through audio-visual capture and the camera eye’s and the editing process’s reconfiguration of the human body. Performances can be reassembled on a single screen, or through multiple arrangements on a variety of screens. I therefore propose the construction of cinematic montage in spatial and temporal layers, which combines poetic potentialities between bodily and audio-visual performances. Cine-performance uses the language of cinema to expose and investigate the relationship between performance and its specific context (site, environment, historicity) in order to materialize in sound and image the most ephemeral and immaterial aspects of any action involving the body. And this relationship depends on a performing body that assembles and conceives of a cinematic enunciation within the performance itself, which activates and calls upon cinematic genres to transduce performance into an audio-visual work.