The Plot

PausePlayPlayPrev|Next

THE PLOT is a video performance that borrows from the aesthetics of a téléthéâtre while also cutting through an image-scape more reflective of the digital and social media era. The performance features three people reiteratively telling each other about a hypothetical movie plot that also involves three characters: the Protagonist, the Writer, and the Voice Actor (who eventually becomes the Dancer). The movie plot is a psychological thriller and pseudo-revenge fantasy involving artistic collaborators who become competitors and suggestively lovers. Throughout, themes of miscommunication, desire, and consent surface and disappear.

Using multiple grades of images, captured by multiple camera types, THE PLOT switchbacks between auto-filming, which places the viewer on the inside of the performance, and an outside, more cinematic camera that acts at different moments as a witness or voyeur. These syncopated proximities look for ways to articulate the feeling of seeing and the feeling of being seen.
The Teller, active and alive, reiteratively tells the story that the three characters (The Protagonist, The Writer and The Voice Actor, who eventually becomes the Dancer) perform like an inherited emerging pattern. These characters, interrupted and never fully recovering themselves, make tremble at every distinction the stability of entities and concepts. In other words, the process of differentiation of their identities is in correlation to the indeterminacy of their relation, in which they are distinct and yet not separate. Who came first — the characters or the plot?

There is a tenderness between the three performers/characters and their efforts at telling the story. Faithful to the task, they cradle the opacity of The Source, the profundity of their interdependence and then let it go, over and over, like a breath.
— hanako hoshimi-caines

Credits

Director, video editing: Emma-Kate Guimond
Camera: Isabelle Pauwels
Additional camera: performers
Performers: Jacqueline Van de Geer, Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, Nien-Tzu Weng
Sound recording: Elena Stoodley, Oliver Lewis
Sound design: Elena Stoodley
Sound mixing: Bruno Pucella
Piano composition: Nathan Vanheuverzwijn
Pictures documentation: Paul Litherland
Centre Clark, Montreal