Take a Walk Around State Beach Pedestrian Walkway

The photograph I interpreted [from stop 1] evoked bleakness, but also a sense of stark beauty. The birds aren’t centered; they look like they’ve been frozen in the middle of an exodus toward the edge of the frame. I’d sum the image up in one word: leaving. I was focused on the birds, so the lines with the avian imagery like “this town would surely be deserted if not for mourning doves and crows,” were birthed from images that came to me of these old-timers perched on their barstool roosts. Humans have always envied birds for their flight, but I think it’s deeper than that. For me, flight represents freedom from ties, and the ability to escape. That’s something I think we’ve all felt the urge to do at one time or another. After I settled on the influence of the birds, I simply fleshed out a back story populated with characters, rooted in a place, that envy anyone who wants to take flight.

The essence of the song I interpreted [from stop 2] for us was a sense of impermanence and nostalgia. We chose to approach our choreography without a literal interpretation of the lyrics, so after listening to the song many times, we put it aside. We performed the dance and edited the video without the music, and then added it back in at the end of the creative process.

We got this idea of a relationship through time and the idea of leaving. We decided to film different passages back and forth through the frame with various meetings and fading in and out of characters representing impermanence. It seemed like there was an autumn feeling to the song, which is why we used a sepia tone. We used the appearing and disappearing characters to explore the duality of identity acknowledging that we’re not always just one personality or emotion or entity and that we are complex and can have many feelings at the same time. For example, the sentiment “Should I stay or should I go?” Our passage through the frames could be a metaphor for different memories, dreams, projections, thoughts, or fantasies. At the end, at the table, there is finally a sense of place and a rustic elegant sensibility to it but then even that is impermanent and disappears around us.

Susanna Bauer’s Interview with Sally Taylor about interpreting the dance from stop 3.

Sally: Without going back to the dance that inspired you to creat this sculpture, what do you remember about it?

Susanna: A wooden barn building, a fig tree, a woman and a man appearing and disappearing, meeting and dancing together, separating, meeting again, connecting, and towards the end sitting down at a table drinking wine and leaving together.

Sally: What was your first reaction to the dance? (thoughts, emotions, memories, tastes, smells etc?)

Susanna: Summer, wood, made me think of times spent with my partner at an old house in France

Sally: If you had to choose one word to sum up the dance what would it be?

Susanna: Relationship

Sally: What emotion did it elicit?

Susanna: searching for calmness

Sally: What was the dance about in your mind? (Did it tell a story? Paint a picture? Etc.)

Susanna: For me it told a story about a relationship, maybe the story of many relationships, the tangles and challenges, times of closeness and distance, sometimes confusion, finding common ground and connectedness.

Sally: Take me through each step of your process from getting the dance to the creation of your work.

Susanna: Viewing the dance several times in a row, then not watching it for a couple of days just keeping it in my mind. The essence that stayed was the notion of movement and the development of a relationship. The question of how to visually express it. Transferring this to my preferred medium I thought of falling leaves, tracing their paths and how they might connect. The theme of relationships appears quite often in my work and for me a leaf has got personality and individuality – it took a while to find a couple that could dance together. Choosing a frame size to work to and then experimenting with different paths allowing the natural curl of a crochet line to have its say.

Sally: What did you title your work and why?

Susanna: I simply called my piece of work ‘A Dance’ as this is where it came from and I would like to leave any further interpretation to the individual viewer.

Sally: What part of your work came to you first?

Susanna: Two leaves.

In the sculpture [from stop 4] there was a sense of longing, searching for purpose in a weighted sort of weightless way. I felt longing and discovery, weakness and strength, awareness, and heartache. The idea of painting on a circle was my immediate response to the music because it felt circular to me like you were going to arrive back at the same place you started from. The chair in my image symbolizes home and waiting to return. I titled my work “Compass.” The stars are often used for navigation, to find your way home. The dangling piano weights represent time, like a pendulum–Vertical time instead of horizontal.