Learn To Speak Body: Tape 5

A collaboration with BodyVox dance company.

Director, Writer, Editor: Mitchell Rose

Producers: Ashley Roland, Jamey Hampton, Mitchell Rose

Performers:
Leslie Braverman
Jamey Hampton
Sara Anderson
Ashley Roland
Eric Oglesbee
Eric Skinner
Daniel Kirk

Narrator: Fritz Sperberg

Composer: Billy Goodrum

Screenings:

WorldFest Houston, First Prize
Dances With Films, Second Prize
Maryland Film Festival
Woodstock Film Festival
Wine Country Film Festival
Portland Film Festival
Ashland Independent Film Festival
Baltimore Artscape
American Cinematheque Comedy Shorts

Director's Statement:

I am an obsessive pattern seeker and deconstructor of the familiar, perpetually torturing myself by searching for meaning in the mundane. So when I was a choreographer, and human movement was the stuff of my realm, I would always observe people’s posture and gesture, trying to parse the meaning behind them.

I was interested (back then) in creating a dictionary of the archetypes of human gesture, breaking down and categorizing the meaning of personal motion and geometry. For example, this would include a section on head conjugation. The words “hit” and “hid” vary only slightly in construction and sound, but vary greatly in meaning. Likewise the suggested body language of head position varies greatly with only the slightest change of inclination, rotation, and forward/back displacement. I wanted to catalog this postural grammar.

Time passed. Civilizations rose and fell. I became a filmmaker and eventually revisited dance with a suite of Chaplinesque films called Modern Daydreams, made in collaboration with Portland-based dance company BodyVox. BodyVox later commissioned me to make a new film for them and this idea of a body language dictionary burbled up from the idea archives. At first I thought I would merely treat it in essay form but then decided that that would be too similar to my film Elevator World which also dealt with human movement, in this case, inter- rather than intrapersonal—the spatial politics of elevator riding. So I decided to use the instructional language video form which was a natural for the subject matter.

Though I have made them into jokes, I believe all of the interpretations of body language in this film are essentially true.