A man explores the boundaries of his own body and the static image frame, in a desperate struggle with the surrounding shadows, in a dance both with and against an outside world which isn’t there. The body situates itself in a state of permanent flux, caught in a parallel time dimension. Gestures are undone and divided, repeated and rewound, slowed down and sped up into kinetic, inconceivable figures, making up the thread of an oddly consistent pantomime...
Dance: Bud Blumenthal / Sound: Antonin De Bemels
Prize for Video Dance Creation at the 11th Grand Prix International Vidéo-Danse, Paris, April 2002 and Special Mention at Il Coreografo Elettronico, Naples, May 2003
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