Story by Meg Fair, photos are screenshots from ‘Heritage Sites’
Moments of stillness collide with explosions of urgency and manic energy as dancers explore their bodies and space in Alexandra Bodnarchuk‘s dance film Heritage Sites. The film begins with shots of each dancer in the cast in a simple white bathtub in the middle of a raw warehouse lined with pillars. It is quiet, intimate. It feels voyeuristic almost, like watching someone in a private ritual of self-examination and reflection.
Heritage Sites, not unlike Bodnarchuk’s prior stage work, centers an internal journey or experience, painting a picture in its movement that puts you into the mind of the performer. It puts into motion the rich inner life most of us experience when we are left alone with our thoughts. Bodnarchuk worked with cinematographer Arlo Myren, editor Robert Uehlin and producer Joe Crook to put this movement and feeling into film format.
The first portion of the piece is quiet, marked by bursts of motion and natural noise. The sound is dominated by the sounds of the space, the bathtub, the breathing of the performers and the splashes and plunks of water meeting skin. Quiet submersion is disrupted by a dancer bursting forth from underneath, water splashing onto the cold concrete outside the tub. The subtle wardrobe work by Rachel Miller of black t-shirts and underwear, paired with small details like black hair ties and a nude hair net mirror the wardrobes of someone hanging around their house alone, performing bedtime rituals, furthering the feeling of intimacy.
Bodnarchuk’s artistic associate Brandon Anderson Musser provides the score and sound design, and as the hum and trills and patterns of tone push towards the soundscape’s foreground, the dancers arrive on the floor–like fish out of water, now all together in one visual space. Dancers Sarah McCullough, Camille Horstmann, Alejandra Iannone, Sara Karimi, Cullen Propp, Jessica Teska and Alicia Hann move with electricity. The passages of group choreography are marked by the sounds of breath, the slapping of skin, movements both graceful and unusual. There is a portion of choreography where the tongue leads the movement–it is not glamorous, but it is visceral, unnerving, intriguing.
In shots of individual dancers, variations of choreography, tiny movements of details here and there in the way a dancer settles back down to the floor or moves positions, there is an intimacy and an autonomy–a dance troupe that can move in synchronicity while remaining individual dancers. While the overarching narrative of self-examination in insular spaces tethers the dancers together, each performer is subtly telling their own version of that narrative.
Though the film itself is only a little over 10 minutes long, its sound and motion stuck with me, popping into my head in the days and weeks after first watching it. It made me think of the way I examine myself and move in moments of solitude. How do we move when we are completely alone, when we feel like no one is observing us or scrutinizing us? How do we scrutinize our bodies, our physical vessels when we are left alone with them, and how do we make peace with them? Heritage Sites is a thoughtful artistic articulation of those questions.
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