Description
Playpoem Verse III opens with an overhead view of an electric keyboard. Eleven pairs of hands approach the keys from the front and rear of the keyboard. From the rear, fingers from five pairs of hands cover each of the black notes and from the front, fingers from six pairs of hands cover all the white keys. Starting from the right of the screen and the high notes of the keyboard, the hands play all of the notes in a descending scale. Once they reach the last bass note, they return ascending to the highest note.
Statement
Playpoem Verse III is part of a series of videos and performances inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Published in 1931, she called it her “play-poem”. In these works, I imagine myself as Virginia Woolf with a camera and a desire to play with bodies of text, hands, the tide, the ocean and the land. This thought guided the making of these works during a two-year residency at the Université de Moncton and Mount Allison University, Sackville in New Brunswick. Students from the music department of the Université de Moncton were the stars of this video.