India Love . . . 3, 2, 1: Creative Play!

Today was a studio day. As exciting as the beginning of my week was, I really needed to stay in the studio and work on some projects. And while I didn't get to the movie making part of this work, I did start putting together the format for what the little films will be. And really I'm creating a backdrop for a much larger film project that I am hoping to create over the summer months in Baltimore. The day started out with me cutting the shapes of my dance poses out of patterned paper that I felt looked very similar to the textiles found in the museums here at Sanskriti. The cutting actually took me through the morning and up until noon. In fact, I am still doing some cutting. Goodness! At noon, the 4 India-based artists gave presentations to their mentors and the people supporting their stay at Sanskriti. I sat in on the presentations and was absolutely floored by their varied and technical skills. One of the young women showed these beautiful drawings that she made by burning paper with incense. I really loved how the light interacted with these pieces (see in the video above). Each one of these young artists was extremely prolific, showing between 50 and 80 works a piece. (It was on a projector, so it was mainly the clicking through of images. But wow!) At 130pm, we broke for lunch. After lunch I went back to my studio and continued on with my work. My goal is to use the dance poses to create various kaleidoscope-type animations to be used as a backdrop for a dance video that I will be working on at a later date. Essentially I will be dancing in front of the animated kaleidoscope: you get me? So once I am able to complete the kaleidoscope (you can see part of it above), I will move around the different parts while taking images and create a little stop-motion animation. The second part of my project involves working on the trophy mock-ups. A little bit of that will be done tomorrow morning and also on Sunday, as it was so cold today that I could not bare to even work with the wet clay (which is outside). But I did end up drawing up sketches for the pieces. I also did a fair amount of research, looking for a classical Indian dance instructor here in Delhi. I'm hoping to hear back from someone tomorrow. To continued success!