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“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.”

~ E.E. Cummings

ORA (an experimental dance film by Philippe Baylaucq)

 

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

ORA | Psyche Films

 

 

Silver (by Jeannette Encinias)

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.

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THE ROOTS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

The trans teen trend: a case of social contagion?