"tethered" is a collaboration with Tony-award winning director-choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, interdisciplinary cinematographer, Sue Murad, multidiscplinary artist Jessi Stegall, and myself. Part dance-theatre and part documentary, the unifying theme of the collaborative film is the tethering of different dimensions within partnership. The creative endeavor itself involves a recursive, interdisciplinary journey between the mediums of film and choreography, highlighting the relationship between rehearsing+performing, process+product, direction+editing. Rather than storyboarding in advance, the collaborators pursue a responsive-emergent method, positioning Sue (cinematography) and Raja (directing) on an even plane to respond to what manifests in the moment. 

 

Raja designed movement propositions that extrapolate on defining, illustrating, and abstracting ‘tethered’: what does it feel like, what does it look like, can one be tethered to an idea, to a person, to oneself? These same questions are asked of the process itself, provoking the way performance often disguises process; research as only a means to an end and documenting only as a means to feature. Sue engaged with the same questions as she captured and edited: what happens when the process of creating is tethered to the product?

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This project is supported by the Harvard ArtLab and the Center for the Arts at Northeastern University.