Over the past year, Richard Ducker has been working with New York-based contemporary dance choreographer Heidi Latsky, investigating the relationship between the moving body in space and the moving image on screen. Rather than documenting a single performance, Ducker looks to find an equivalence between the two media.
Heidi Latsky works with a range of dancers who are diverse in race, age and body shape, who at times deliberately question the usual archetypes of dance movement. Tracking Parallel was originally devised to make a work about the parallel lives we all led during the enforced isolation of the Covid lockdowns, but it gained more immediacy in response to Heidi’s own recent health crisis. Dance is perhaps the oldest and most primal form of human expression. It is an act of freedom, of escaping constraint, and in this context, an articulation of what it means to be alive. The work speaks to personal survival in states of contingency and temporal fragility.
The three-screen video installation explores this through a visual lexicon that examines how the image functions in time within the fluid nature of performance. Using the moving image as a device of seduction and spectacle, the body here is both sensual and corporeal. It articulates being inside a performance where it is the fragments of expression that present its precariousness.
Credits
Choreography: Choreography by Heidi Latsky in collaboration with the dancers
Camera: Richard Ducker & Adam Simon
Sound: Score by Heidi Latsky featuring MRI sounds and original music by X.I.M.E.N.A Borges and Ainesh Madan, Sonya Park, Dancer’s footsteps
Editing: Richard Ducker
Dancers: Jillian Hollis, Meredith Fages, Nico Gonzales, Henry Holmes, Leslie Taub, Roxanne Young & Heidi Latsky
