Every so often the gods of creativity and circumstance smile beneficently upon me and the project that I have envisioned in my brain looks exactly like the project that I end up creating. Making Lavender Haze was one of these times.
I think many circus artists have felt that rush of hearing a song for the first time, when suddenly an act springs from our brain pan, fully formed, like Pallas Athena out of Zeus’ helmet. For me, usually, these are little daydreams which quickly fizzle out when held up for closer inspection.
When I heard aeseaes’ cover of the ubiquitous track it sunk its hooks into me. Gently. A few listens later I could see a storyboard for a video piece, anchored by the sexiest of all juggling—hoop rolling. At the time, hoop rolling was still quite new to me and my skills not up to snuff, so I filed it away and added the song to my rolling playlist.
More and more over the last few years, video has really become my ideal performance and circus creation vessel. I am not a born performer. I always suffered from from intense nerves before going onstage in my short tenure as a theater kid. My semi-annual piano recitals (never mind the competitions) were nightmare fuel. Getting a solo in jazz band was not a cause for joy. As someone who’s done an awful lot of performing people are usually surprised to hear this, but much more about that at a later date.
What I can verbalize now is that I’m an artist. I live to create. As a circus artist, performing is often a necessary side effect of the creation process, not the thing that drives it.
Hence video being such a delicious and powerful medium for me. It allows a shift in perspective between audience and performer that a typical staged performance doesn’t. It lets me highlight aspects of a piece that might otherwise get swallowed by necessary distance. A camera could go up my left nostril if we wanted it to (we do not). And of course, it allows for a great degree of control which is helpful if you’re someone who generally has a plan and wants to stick to it.
In this particular instance a handful of LEDs from Amazon, a smoke machine I’ve had since 2016, and a very obliging buddy, allowed me to replicate, almost exactly, the idea that I’d been brewing in my head.
Part of the Audacity Project is making a promo reel. I made a hoop juggling demo earlier this year, so I asked Rachel what I should be doing when that week rolled around. She asked me ‘well, what other video do you need to make?’ Dear Reader, I knew which video.
There’s a lot that’s felt synchronous about my creative process lately, and this was another one of those things. I’d just crested over the skill-ridge in hoop rolling to where I felt I could do justice to this vision if I dove into it. Also, I’d just bought those LEDs and they give off a very fetching shade of purple. All I needed to round it out was a co-conspirator, a filming date, and a pair of fishnets.
The co-conspirator was an easy choice. My friend Jill and I spent a lot of quality time unemployed together in the first half of 2020. We started out by logging a lot of trail miles across western Connecticut, and then when we started repeating a lot of those trail miles (Connecticut is not a large place), we started frolicking in the woods in fancy outfits and playing with my expensive camera. Jill turned out to be interested in learning some photography, so we’ve kept up both the frolicking and the photography and now she knows her way quite handily around framing a good shot. She’d never shot video before, and I’ll give you a spoiler by saying she knocked it out of the park.
So, one Sunday night in late October I set up LEDs, did some test shots, moved the LEDs around, and then plugged in the smoke machine and we got to work. The work itself was easy, joyous. There is, as it turns out, immense joy in pressing the green trigger button on the smoke machine. We lost several years of our lives to the chemical haze required for the Aesthetic. We agreed it was worth it. We filmed most of what we meant to, we filmed some of what we didn’t.
One of the things I find particularly joyous about creating a video work like this is that there’s a certain element of improvisation. If there were an alignment chart for performance, I would be solidly all the way in the top left corner under Lawful Choreo. If there’s one thing I’m not (see above statements about jazz band) it’s an improviser. When creating video though, improvisation feels safe and accessible. Nothing terrible will happen if I try something and it ends up looking awful, it just ends up on the digital cutting room floor never to be seen by outside eyes. The main improvisation for me though, is in the editing.
Editing has always been my favorite part of the film-making process, in large part because it, itself, is an act of creation, of making order out of a chaos of clips. It’s also, in a project like this, an act of improvisation. There’s a lot of space between a shot list and a finished product. When I edit, especially in a free-form project like this I have to trust my instincts and go with my gut, otherwise nothing will ever get done. The way things look on camera is always slightly different, and sometimes the best shot is the one you never saw coming.
Without further ado, here’s a sneak peek at Lavender Haze, exclusively for you, my Patrons, before it gets released into the wild. I hope you like it (in both internet and normal senses of the verb), and as always, I welcome your comments. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to my YouTube to stay extra in the loop.
I cherish every one of you.
PS: This is probably going to be the last major post available to free subscribers, so now is a great time to upgrade your membership if you’ve been enjoying what I’m putting out there! Xoxo
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