A man struggling with loneliness, anxiously looking for a way out of his confinement in his own reflection. Enclosed within the limitations of the frame, the body itself turns into a stage, a space in which time and speed are abstracted beyond the conventional limitations of perception and movement. The upper body rotates around itself, multiplies itself in countless shapes, loses itself in a frantic dance of micro-physical vibrations and light stimuli, decelerates, comes to a grinding halt in steady poses and is incessantly thrown back into a self-contained cycle of movements.
Dance: Bud Blumenthal / Sound: Antonin De Bemels
Springdance Cinema Award 2000, Utrecht, Netherlands
Scrub solo series
When they met each other in 1998, Antonin De Bemels and Bud Blumenthal discovered a mutual fascination for the exploration of the relationship between body and image, between dance and cinema. A first collaboration came about during the creation of the dance piece Rivermen (1999), for which De Bemels developed the auditory and visual background. This stimulating exchange of ideas and perspectives resulted in the production of the so-called “Scrub solos series” (1999-2001), a triptych of short videochoreographic scenes, in which the body of the dancer, moving in slow motion, is explored from a fixed viewpoint, filmed by a camera set to long exposure recording. The resulting Super-8 images were digitized, completed with a soundtrack and subsequently manipulated according to the “scrubbing” principle – a technique, present in most editing software – which in effect might be compared to the “scratching” of a DJ. Images and sounds are treated as a single organic whole, and together they constitute a double rhythm, nestling itself inside and in between the original images, where it keeps growing rank and mutating. The result is a radical transformation of the body itself, based on the interaction between movement and light, between film recording and video editing, between the continuous and the static.
Courtesy of the artist