dance, dreams, poems

This section brings together a loose collection of film and video pieces dating from 1969 to 1984 that are more widely experimental than my main video work.

They include the purely poetic, K in 1969, the dreamlike poem Hanwell Locks, an ontological self-enquiry Three Ways, the angry, polemical Death of Van Gogh, the abstracted dance exploration In Earnest, the landscape poem Moving and the half-documentary, half-poem Brewing.

The first four all pre-dated access to video technology, so were on film. Three of the first four used existing music tracks as I developed towards a live performance aesthetic, and the latter three were all on video within that live performance mode. Brewing was performed live in sections as it needed to be edited together to form a seamless whole.

I was drawn to the “moving image”, so I worked with film when there was no choice, but moved wholly to video when I realised its power to by-pass the processing and editing stages inherent with film. These differences between the two media are much less irrelevant today (2016) as everything is pretty much made within a digital domain.