Supported By: “Judaica: Embodied Laboratory for Songwogrk” (AHRC Leadership Fellowship 2016-2018)
The Research Centre for Performance Practices (ReCePP) at University of Huddersfield
Tittle: Embodied through frames and edits
Abstract
The presentation will discuss the process of framing and editing the video article The Lion and the Breath: Combining Kalaripayattu and Fitzmaurice Voicework techniques towards a new cross-cultural methodology for actor training for the Journal of Embodied Research. The presentation argues the video of the practice can provide a way of looking and witnessing the practice in the studio, articulating that through the process of editing, embodied experience, has a big stake in terms of remembering, reliving.
In the process of the framing and editing the video, my collaborators and I became aware of challenges of what is epistemological viable versus an aesthetic choice. What do we need to put in place, in order to create this sense of embodied experiential witnessing of the practice within the studio?
To create a sense of embodiment through the mediated experience of a video article, my collaborators and I had to made decisions on:
Where to place the camera in the studio?
What footages to use? Can they be used?
What sort of framing? Wide-angle shot/ close up?
How are the frames edited in order to show the process and then the actual research outcomes?
Editing Process:
As my collaborators and I view the footages, we begin to relive the experience of remembering the practice while editing. There is a realisation that a connection between our body in the editing room and the body in the image is evident, making the editing room an extension of the studio. This remembering allowed us to explore with multi-layers of sounds-bites and inter-cutting of the various footages. These explorations, raise and highlighted the potentiality of this audio-visual body as an extension of the experience in the studio that can help frame the studio work, the fieldwork and the findings, affecting our experience of a lived embodiment.