media artist | filmmaker


    



Original Works
Participation

Dance, Language2021

Single-channel video, color, sound, 10 min 34 sec | Documentary




Every parole (language as uttered by an individual) is incomplete. Something excluded from language therefore cannot help but seep into parole, and because of this, parole suffers.
- Pascal Quignard, Le nom sur le bout de la langue (Korean edition, 2005), pp.76-77


Dance, Language captures moments when a language before language is uttered through gesture, glimpses its potential to expand through media, and imagines new signs.

Gesture is the oldest language humans have. Long before we made sounds with agreed-upon mouth shapes, gestures were expressing desire in the most direct way. Yet to belong to the axis of ‘language,’ gesture would need a refined grammar that the society using that language can accept. Dance holds gestures within rhythm to create shapes an audience can understand, and action breathes within agreed limits, willingly captured by the stage and the camera. Their will to communicate is too strong to be summed up as ‘what is not language’ (the non-verbal).

We put on camera people who speak with their bodies rather than with words. Had they wanted to deliver a message people could easily understand, they would have chosen words. Compared with written or spoken language, gesture is doubly abstract, unstructured, and even inefficient. We asked them why they chose gesture. They answered us both in spoken language and in gesture. Somehow they seemed freer when given a stage than when asked for a spoken interview. Perhaps it was hard to compress things they themselves could not be sure of into words that are accepted all too easily. Thought is closely tied to language, and language makes thought clear, but some ideas and feelings are already embedded in the body before they are even ‘thought.’ Gestural language is more primal than spoken language. Rather than passing through the brain’s circuits of thought, gesture is produced by the rebound of the spinal cord, the contraction and expansion of muscles, and, deeper still, something innate that makes us ‘itch.’ The distance from there to language is quite far. We came to accept that gesture may have been the way to close that distance.

Gesture is sometimes expressed in forms that draw out emotion, and sometimes imitates objects or animals. Because it uses the whole body, its range of expression is wider than that of spoken language, but the body has its limits. We briefly loosened those limits through media art and computer graphics. Somewhere between essence and imitation, the desire to express becomes clearer, and at times drifts further from expression. Bacon’s portraits distort the body to ask how far the self extends. We, conversely, wanted to approach essence through distortion. We passed through a first distortion in the acts of bending and stretching the body, a second in extending the body with computer graphics, and a third in capturing it all within the screen and the music.

The body of a performer being interviewed and a body transformed in real time through camera and software are juxtaposed in a single space-time.
The ‘parole’ one seeks to express through dance or gesture passes through technology and extends into a new body.


Created by Minsu Kim, Jihyo Eom & Soyoung Han
Directed by Minsu Kim, Jihyo Eom & Soyoung Han
Line Producer. Yujun Ha
Cinematographers. Minsu Kim & Soyoung Han
Gaffer. Dojun Yu
Art & VFX. Jihyo Eom
Editor. Minsu Kim, Jihyo Eom
Sound. Seyun Park
Contemporary Dance. Somi Bae
Action. Youngjo Choi
Flamenco. Soldonna
Supported by Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA)




2020 Selected, Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) Online/New Media Video Content Open Call