Floating Departures: Developing Quarantine Dance Technique as an Artistic Practice Beyond the Pandemic
Shannon Cuykendall, Steve DiPaola · 2022
We describe our process of quarantine dance technique in making the dance film and meditation, Floating Departures. This work, created during lockdown in 2021, brings together dance movement, poetry, painterly styles, and sound to explore cyclical patterns and points of departure in movement and life. To create Floating Departures we used a broad range of technologies–from everyday objects to smartphones to AI art systems. We experiment with various techniques to record ourselves and bring our movement together in a shared digital space with post-production video editing techniques. Using a bricolage approach, we incorporate materials, such as bubble wrap and balloons, to transform our spaces and explore our personal experiences during lockdown. We construct multiple layers of reality that are further transformed in unanticipated directions with AI technologies. Through our creation process, we develop a collective physical body to explore a new realm, unbound by reason or logic, that was only made possible through our remote collaborative processes and technologically-mediated interactions.