Birthday Poem for My Grandmother – An Interpretation Through Dance
What happens when literature is interpreted kinesthetically through dance; visually through videography, editing, and costume design; and aurally through sound design? A successful collaboration such as this produces a multi-layered, interpretive response to the language, emotion, and imagery of the original writing. We selected Sharon Olds’s poem “Birthday Poem for my Grandmother” as the impetus for our interpretation, and were able to create a kinesthetic response to the ideas of memory, life and death, and ascension and descension. The use of video coupled with dance (choreographed for film) allowed us the creative freedom, through editing, to produce a piece that could not be physically accomplished through live performance alone. Using this medium also gave us the ability to emphasize or de-emphasize kinesthetic elements and sequences to communicate the overall concept and emotive qualities of the original literary work. It further gave us the ability to harness the innate visual qualities of the location—the imagery of the frozen lake; the rustling dead leaves; the posture of the dancer reflecting the rhythm of a stand of tree branches or entangled in exposed, normally subterranean roots; and the wind moving clouds like slow, distant recollections and later lifting and blowing sand from the dunes in a portrayal of fleeting and shifting memories. The final work is a multifaceted amalgam of movement, sound, vision and temporal responses to a classic work of literature.
{vimeo}https://vimeo.com/273754697{/vimeo}
Credits
Choreography
Jan Erkert & Sara Hook
Dancer
Sara Hook
Video + Editing
Daniel Goscha
Music + Sound Design
Richard Woodbury
Dress Design
Susan Becker & Rose Morefield
Special Thanks
Joseph Squier, Nan Goggin, Jennifer Gunji, Jodee Stanley, Laura Bandy, Bernt Lewy
