How to Direct Movement Quality?

Jul 16

When working with a dance artist I always look for ways for us to connect and discover new things together. Movement quality refers to “the how” of the movement. Its mood, tension, pace. It could be soft, hard, rigid, fluid, robotic, etc. In my session with Candice, we played a game she taught us at freestyle practice “MoveMEANT” series organized by Dancer’s Unlimited .

***Freestyle means that dance is not choreographed and the movement is completely improvised often in response to music.

The game was about switching between masculine and feminine expressions. There are obvious expressions that we are more used to. Feminine quality is sensual and soft whereas muscling quality has more firm energy. We played around with it. But we also looked into a more nuanced and less binary quality.

Candice's fashion style reflects her complex layers of identity and I loved how she styled herself for our session: long skirts over pants and shirts with vests.

For the first look, I chose to accent pink parts on her skirt with violet as a background color. It’s a color between purple and magenta. Violet is often used to represent royalty. This color helped to make the image striking and dramatic.

For the second look to make her skin color and her golden-brown shirt to be an accent and I used blue as the primary color. Blue is the color of spirituality and air. This light blue helped us to achieve a more pensive and introspective mood.

In post-production, I took the idea of showcasing the photos a little bit further.

I love the idea of collaging and animation.

In Photoshop I “cut out” Canfice’s body from the background and saved it as a PNG file. Additionally, I made a file with different body parts and started to play around in Premier animating it with video footage of her.

Lastly, I color-graded video footage. I usually use photos, if I have them, as a reference for color-grading.