A Dance in Purple, in Folio Leaves

A Dance in Purple, in Folio Leaves from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

(Recommend watching 'fullscreen' - movement and detail clearer.)

Folio: a sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves, or four pages, of a book or manuscript.

Late afternoon on Saturday, when the spring sun was pouring in, I videotaped some dancing to José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith." Besides being technically beautiful, quite Baroque in its composition, there is an undercurrent of feeling in this music. Music like this can awaken the inner self in its dance, or this is how it calls to me.

And I layered dances to the same tune: first I separated the figures, but it didn't look quite right, so I superimposed them, allowing the dance of the two to occur in the same space, an intertexuality of subjectivities, like folio leaves.

The figure is me mostly because I am a very private person and those closest to me, extended family I guess, don't want to be videoed. I see the figure as not me, though me.

I always leave space for text, but perhaps, there won't be any, it's unnecessary. Though it does need a title, and perhaps an inscription at the beginning, a quote, an image, not sure.

When this video is finished (and it might already be, not sure), I'll upload to YouTube (Picasa's great but doesn't offer an embeddable player like YouTube does, and without paying Vimeo you can only upload videos up to 500MG a week there, so YouTube for a higher resolution and potentially more viewers).

From The Canvas Backdrop

(The Picasa version, which is showing a blank green screen to some viewers, hence uploading to Vimeo this morning.)

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After I'd finished this version of the video, I thought of this painting and poem, from 2006:

Dancing of the Selves, painting and    photographs, ©2006

Dancing of the Selves What is the self? Peel away to nothing. Only energies, inner winds and flames streams of thought a body of cells of earthdust. Who am I? Am I my memories shifting and changing like ice flows or the sand of the desert? We are transducers, relay switches, cross-currents of selves. I deconstruct in paint across the canvas. Am I what I offer-- scrawl of words, strokes of paint, a flash dance through the air, a few ideas, a point of gravity where the light bends?

My children who tumbled out of me? I am a link in the generations, an ancestor's granddaughter, great aunt of the future, a name for genealogists. A living person breathing over the page where I write. A slight tangle in the ganglia of neurons, and my memories, gone. That's not me. I am who I am loving you.