Medium Specificity

Who Needs a Beat When Your Feet Just Go?

The idea to do a project on how reliant dance is on music came for me when I was watching the film Amadeus. There was a scene in which Mozart was tasked with the project of creating an opera for the Emperor but was unable to do a specific scene because the emperor had banned something along the lines of not being able to sing and dance in the same scene. This forced Mozart to do the scene with no music, which resulted in a very awkward scene. This got me thinking about how much music dictates dance and how much the beat controls the way you move.

To study this, I planned on having my friend improv a dance to a song. I had her do this to show how she was able to dance well to a song because she was able to move with the beat of the song. I then was planning on moving the music resulting in the music being off from the dance. When I went to do this part I decided to just repeat the dance on the second half of the song but to my surprise, the same dance still looked good on a part of the song she did even dance to. I then realized that even though most of the song had changed, the beat was still the same resulting in the dance to match up perfectly. Since this worked out I decided to keep it. I thought this was really interesting because I felt it furthered my hypothesis even more than my original idea because it showed that all a dancer needs is a beat and they are able to move their feet. It also was interesting to see how my friend was able to completely improv a dance to a song just by moving with the beat. Even though she is a dance major, I have had a similar experience to this where I have no dance history but often find myself dancing to music I have never heard before but am able to move to the beat.

What inspired me about McCloud’s comic was how he explained the history and evolution of comics. This lead me to think of the history of dance and how music has always been a factor of it. Even though music and dance have both evolved so much, dance is still very dependent upon the beat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY6bI3zqFQw

The Manson Family murders are some of those creepy-and-intriguing stories that are hard to believe and yet, are completely believable. Ex-con Charles Manson was the leader of the hippie cult of the Manson Family, who were involved in a series of murders and crimes¹. Mysteriously, he was also seriously involved with the Beach Boys²; he was a fan, a friend, a colleague, and a solicitor. In one confusing instance, the Beach Boys found themselves in the middle of an almost-lawsuit dealing with charges of abuse and forms of kidnapping, though it was hard for either of us to find conclusive coverage of the real story of Lotus-Flower.

It was hard for either of us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of any of the characters, so we decided to allow our imagination to exaggerate. We thought it would be interesting to write a short story based on the perspective of the two hitchhiking Manson girls. Our characters are all based on real people, but we tried to focus on what our first-impressions were of those real people and incorporate them into dramatic straw-people. Their dialogue is stiff and blunt, yet descriptive. The scenes show a glimpse of what life in the Manson home was like, using whatever little information we could gather and assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson

http://crime.about.com/od/manson/a/charlesmanson.htm

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5xjwE7gM8jjM3lBdHdXZUZrakU/view?usp=sharing

When our group decided we wanted to represent the process of falling asleep, there were immediate challenges. Most obviously, sleep is problematic because it is not a noisy process. The idea of communicating restlessness with sound was challenging to us. We decided to use rustling, irregular breathing and distorting time to communicate the inability to fall asleep. Having looked at the project holistically, context seems to render the early material virtually intelligible.

We also decided to depict the act of falling asleep in a surreal manner. This is entirely formed by the process of going to sleep. As the mind relaxes, what neuroscientists call alpha waves begin to manifest in the brain at high levels. Once these waves become predominantly what are called beta waves, the body is asleep. However, there is no sharp demarcation between the two types of wave. So as our minds go to sleep, consciousness is mixed with unconsciousness. Thus, we experience a state where rationality mingles with dream logic. Additions like the hypnotist could be external, or it could just be a sort of proto-dream sequence.

Of Broderick Fox’s modes of documentary, the piece our group made is most reminiscent of observational, performative, and poetic. In a sense, this is an observation of sleep, however, instead of being scientific, it takes artistic liberties. That the piece takes such liberties is what ties it to the performative and the poetic forms. For example, with the absence of any imagery, much of the material in this process piece is left up for interpretation. The listener is more or less unaware when the subject is actually asleep, therefore one is not able to discern what is reality or simply a pigment of the subject's imagination. We decided to approach this topic with these artistic liberties, because often when one is falling asleep or attempting to sleep, it is hard to tell the difference between reality and the dream world.



Arguably the most essential element of this documentation is the guitar. We decided to use the guitar as a representation of what the subject was thinking. The chords begin when the subject coughed, this was intended to be some sort of starting point for his thoughts, it is when the subject is finally at rest and is able to let his mind wander. Other than the starting point, how we structured the guitar, is left open to interpretation. It is also applicable to all people because it has no words, therefore anyone can decide what the guitar chords mean to them.