Here is a movement study that I did for "blood run":
Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "ethnographic"
FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
1. What emotions, visceral responses, and/or meaning does the movement evoke for you?
2. What might you like to see as accompanying sound, if anything?*
3. What do you think about the current arc of the study? Are there sections that you might like to reorder? Are there moments you would like to see further fleshed out?**
4. Do you see any connections to other "blood run" material? How might you imagine this movement living with the other material?
5. Other thoughts or suggestions?
CONTEXT
This movement was developed from some of the visual iconography of the Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751), which Emma Jinhua Teng discusses in her chapter on "Picturing Savagery" from her book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography. According to Teng, this work, which took over a decade to complete, was an ambitious project to catalog various non-Han "barbarians" by the Qing. Over two thirds of the illustrations were of non-Han ethnic minorities living within the empire, including Taiwanese indigenous peoples, though it also included people from other Asian countries and Europeans (163). They are depicted in pairs of male and female like representative "specimens." I attempted to embody the different energies, bodily positions, actions conveyed by the illustrations, and to move into and through the different characters with a somatic awareness.
*Some ideas I had for sound included (a) voicing my internal imagery -- "heavy silk," "floating feather," "daikon offering," "chin forward,", (b) visual projection or voiceover of the characters as listed in the original illustrations -- "Korean gentleman," "raw savage of Zhanghua county," (3) music that references the places these characters are from.
**I just realized that I forgot one pair of characters ("Cooked Savages of Fengshan County"), who appear to be the most "refined" of the Taiwanese indigenes represented, so I can add them in if you think it would be interesting.
Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password: "ethnographic"
FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
1. What emotions, visceral responses, and/or meaning does the movement evoke for you?
2. What might you like to see as accompanying sound, if anything?*
3. What do you think about the current arc of the study? Are there sections that you might like to reorder? Are there moments you would like to see further fleshed out?**
4. Do you see any connections to other "blood run" material? How might you imagine this movement living with the other material?
5. Other thoughts or suggestions?
CONTEXT
This movement was developed from some of the visual iconography of the Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751), which Emma Jinhua Teng discusses in her chapter on "Picturing Savagery" from her book, Taiwan's Imagined Geography. According to Teng, this work, which took over a decade to complete, was an ambitious project to catalog various non-Han "barbarians" by the Qing. Over two thirds of the illustrations were of non-Han ethnic minorities living within the empire, including Taiwanese indigenous peoples, though it also included people from other Asian countries and Europeans (163). They are depicted in pairs of male and female like representative "specimens." I attempted to embody the different energies, bodily positions, actions conveyed by the illustrations, and to move into and through the different characters with a somatic awareness.
*Some ideas I had for sound included (a) voicing my internal imagery -- "heavy silk," "floating feather," "daikon offering," "chin forward,", (b) visual projection or voiceover of the characters as listed in the original illustrations -- "Korean gentleman," "raw savage of Zhanghua county," (3) music that references the places these characters are from.
**I just realized that I forgot one pair of characters ("Cooked Savages of Fengshan County"), who appear to be the most "refined" of the Taiwanese indigenes represented, so I can add them in if you think it would be interesting.
