SWOOP (1992)
Swoop is a short dance film made with Vanessa Smith and Karen Grant, the dance artists and fellow Laban graduates with whom I co-founded the Glasgow-based Randomoptic Pick Up Company in 1990.
The starting point for SWOOP was the concept of drawing together the moments and rhythms of highly stylised ballroom dance with the relaxed idiom of postmodern dance choreography, juxtaposing the forms and creating unique into screendance through montage editing.
Swoop was filmed during the time that I was undertaking the Postgraduate Diploma in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and completed in the following year. Swoop was filmed on Hi Band Umatic, a 3/4 inch tape which was the high-end format used at the School of Television at DJCA at that time.
As a director and editor, I had been exploring the creative possibilities of the repetition and looping of shots since starting to make video dance in 1989. In many ways, the looping of images and sounds in Swoop represents the most complex and detailed of this approach to editing that was possible when working on analogue tape. It would not be until 3 years later, with the editing of Pace on the new non-linear digital edition system AVID that I was able to push the repetition to a greater extreme, through effectively ‘cutting and pasting’ shots. The desire to do so, however, is evident in Swoop.
Working with sound designer and dubbing mixer John Cobban for the first time, the soundtrack for Swoop was created specially for the film, and is based on actuality /synch sounds made by the dancers as they performed that were recorded on location. John took these sounds and layered and looped them into the soundtrack.
When I was editing, we went back and forth a number of times to adjust the structure and timing of the visual and sonic material. Although the first time that John and I worked together, this set the process that we have continued to work with in our collaborations in the 34 years since.
Swoop was made at the time when there were very few screendance festivals and prior to internet distribution and so has not been screened very often.
In 2016, I received funding from Creative Scotland to digitise video dance works that I had made on tape between 1989 - 1995. Swoop was one of the works. I am happy to share it here.
