Artist Statement
The goal of this multimedia video was to take the ideas of traditional mask making from traditional cultures and transport them into themes of modernity.
The video serves as a kind of experiment in the ability of a mask to transport the wearer. The subject was only given a mask and the music of that specific culture and asked to dance whatever she felt.
The purpose of the traditional dance video being edited into the video of the subject dancing was to show the unconscious parallels between the feeling you get from small parts of the culture which can lead to a whole. Essentially the dancer is taking on a new identity in order to understand a different culture. And the dancer is picking up on a perhaps universal "language of sound" which can express emotion and vitality even without concrete information about the culture that produced this particular music or this particular mask.
The juxtaposition of the traditional dances and the subject is intended to show the unconscious parallels and differences.
In Video one is a live marriage ceremony filmed in Bamako, Mali - West Africa. The music accompanying these dancers is played on Jina Djembe Drums. This drumming music is incredibly significant to the study because "Jina" means spirit in West African languages. In the marriage ceremony the playing of the "jina" djembe is supposed to will the spirit of the dancer to dance.
The Second of the traditional dance videos is of a traditional Balinese dance. The dance is an offering to the spirits, but Balinese dance has famously been described as "functional" rather than"expressive" (cf. Colin McPhee). It presents a beautiful pattern of sound, with a clear metallic rhythm but no overt expression of emotion. At the same time, many descriptions of Balinese dance say that the dancer becomes "one with the sound" and the music choreographs movements down to the last detail. So it should be possible to "test" this idea by giving the mask and music to a dancer who is not familiar with the culture from which they came, and to see what she comes up with.
Balinese music had a great influence in western composers, in part through the compositions of Colin McPhee where he made the piano "sound like a gamelan", and hence inspired the "minimalist" music of Stephen Glass and many others. Some people do not even consider gamelan to be music, but just a sort of "magical tinkling' in the background, something which later composers have called "mood music", and which has been extensively used in cinema and in modernist theater.
The question of whether our response to music is a primarily emotional response (a response to rhythm or to the mood altering potential of sound) or a learned cultural response (in which the music is perceived as producing an appropriate corporeal response to a situation) is a question that this project will try to explore.
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Colin McPhee - Tabuh-Tabuhan (2/2)by bartje113,609 views
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