Intangible Body (2016)

• 72%
• 2016
• Emelie Coleman Mahdavian

This experimental film explores censorship of Iranian women's dance performance and what constitutes a woman's "body" in the digital age. Given that women "dancing" in public is illegal in Iran today -- and even animated movies are censored -- we set out to play with the edge of what constitutes a body, a dance, and an Iranian woman. Created via motion capture composited with video, the film has three layers, each representing one aspect of the dancer's body, but without any video of her figure appearing in the final film: the motion capture figure is controlled by an algorithm tied to the speed of the dancer's movement; the music is entirely sampled from her voice; and the fabric with which she danced was isolated in the video via chroma keying to create a residue of her interaction with a prop that invokes the presence of the absent dancer.