“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
Body heat
illuminates a breathtaking dance of light, movement and humanity
The
experimental dance film ORA (2011) was inspired by the French
painter Paul Gauguin’s post-impressionist masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going? (1897-98), and it’s as entrancing and enigmatic as
its muse. Eschewing traditional filmmaking methods in which light is exposed to
film stock or a digital camera sensor, the Canadian filmmaker Philippe Baylaucq
instead captured six dancers in motion using thermal imaging technology that’s
sensitive to even minor heat fluctuations. Together with the Canadian
choreographer José Navas and the Canadian musician Robert M Lepage, who
provides the dreamy, propulsive score, Baylaucq deploys these innovative
methods to create his own impressionistic dive into self-exploration and
existential questions.
The work’s
ethereal beauty contains a clever artistic inversion: the infrared technology
used to make the piece was first invented as a tool of warfare. This novel
approach, combined with innovative staging that included shooting in a
warehouse covered in heat-reflective aluminium panels, required Baylaucq to
push the boundaries of cinema to create an otherworldly effect. These
innovative techniques are evident in the final product, which is surely unlike
anything anything you’ve seen before. As the dancers’ illuminated forms move in
contrast with the dark yet reflective background, their bodies appear at once
surreal and yet intensely human.
Director:
Philippe Baylaucq
Choreographer:
José Navas
Website: National Film Board of Canada
How many years of beauty do I have left?
she asks me.
How many more do you want?
Here. Here is 34. Here is 50.
When you are 80 years old
and your beauty rises in ways
your cells cannot even imagine now
and your wild bones grow luminous and
ripe, having carried the weight
of a passionate life.
When your hair is aflame
with winter
and you have decades of
learning and leaving and loving
sewn into
the corners of your eyes
and your children come home
to find their own history
in your face.
When you know what it feels like to fail
ferociously
and have gained the
capacity
to rise and rise and rise again.
When you can make your tea
on a quiet and ridiculously lonely afternoon
and still have a song in your heart
Queen owl wings beating
beneath the cotton of your sweater.
Because your beauty began there
beneath the sweater and the skin,
remember?
This is when I will take you
into my arms and coo
YOU BRAVE AND GLORIOUS THING
you’ve come so far.
I see you.
Your beauty is breathtaking.
There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a
country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of
bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib
bones,
small calcium words uttered in
sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables
could somehow
fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been
shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised
their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no
place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and
thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat
bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white
linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant
sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing
mystery.
While for certain cousins and
grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at
births,
humming quietly to perspiring
mothers.
The ones stitching intricate
needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil
clothes.
There were those who didn’t care
about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been
to America.
They told the old ones, you are
wasting your time.
Time?—The old ones prayed for the
young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their
brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding
tone.
And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi
the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he
spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.
