Translating Poetry Into Imagery Through Movement and Atmosphere

How do you make someone reading a poem visually interesting? And how do you visually interpret that poem without being over-literal? This was the challenge of this video project. Oh, and all I had to work with was a white cove in a small studio in Shoreditch, London.

I decided, rather than trying to literally tell the narrative of the poem, which dealt with violence in the lives of children growing up in the inner city, to use a dancer to interpret the feeling of the words. And I would use two colours of lighting to reflect the difference between the more positive, optimistic parts of the story and the darker, bleaker passages.

With the use of a lot of haze to diffuse the light, and a projector attachment with which I could create shafts of light cutting through the haze, I created different visual looks for both Maia the poet and Jesse the dancer to reflect the more positive partds of the poem (brighter, warmer tones)and the darker, bleaker parts of the poem (darker, blue tones) and shot multiple takes of Maia reading the poem and Jesse interpreting the feelings of the different passages through movement, assisted by choreographer Luke Cinque White.

By focusing on the emotional tone of the piece rather than trying to dramatise and reenact the story I think we ended up with a much stronger end result. Sometimes simplicity, and creative restrictions, can work in your favour.