As Time Moves
On movement and the space it inhabits.
Dear Reader,
We are thrilled to be able to share that our short film, Time is a Dancer, has recently been screened as an Official Selection at the Rethink Dance Festival in Wisconsin, USA. Time is a Dancer is an experimental film where poetry and movement, two distinct sources of rhythm, come together to embody an abstract but all-pervading force: time. Centred around an original poem written and narrated by astrophysicist Paul Sutter, a long-time collaborator of Dark ‘n’ Light, the film explores time and its facets: the constant heartbeat of the universe which creates both life and chaos, a concept that we can only grasp occasionally through science, philosophy, art, and experience.
The poem, with all its nuances and embodied rhythms, is brought to life by Kate Sutter’s choreography, and the dancers of SYREN Modern Dance. Visualised by Nel Shelby Productions, the film centres the experience of time and the dancer, focusing on movement and the space it inhabits.
Time is a recurring theme we’ve explored at Dark ‘n’ Light. In our newsletter last November, we looked at how people have recorded time through history, “The more we dig into how humans have recorded and experienced time, the more fascinating it is. From the markings on the Ishango bone of the Paleolithic era that could have been a woman 28,000 years ago tracking her menstrual cycle, to ancient Egyptian sundials and ultra precise atomic clocks.”
Four years ago, in one of our early newsletters, we found inspiration in Story of your Life (1998) by Ted Chiang, which was also adapted into the 2016 film Arrival. The film and short story dwell on the concept of time: what would our lives be like if we knew our destiny? And as our founder Susan Mathews wrote in that initial newsletter—and Paul Sutter has captured so beautifully in his poetry—“regardless of the joy or the pain or loss or its foreknowledge,” all we can do is surrender to time.
So, it's safe to say that time is important to us at Dark ‘n’ Light. The universal themes of the poem—embodied time, relationships with time and time keeping that go beyond a clock, the cyclical nature of time, connected to rhythms of the earth and the cosmos—appear in many of our other projects.
If you’d like to explore further, here are a few we recommend:
On Moonlight by Sharanya Mannivanan
The moon in her many phases and faces is a companion, omen, comfort, myth and legend. In this essay, accompanied by her own artwork, author Sharanya Manivannan writes about her love affair with this heavenly body, and how it has shaped her over the years.
Coastal landscapes hold the key to a different kind of time. In this essay, the first part of the ‘Time and Tide’ series, Tasneem Khan introduces us to the phenology of the sea, where geological time converges with biological rhythms.
The Now that Never Is by Paul Sutter
Read more on the nature of time from Paul Sutter, the author of the poem in the film. Can we agree on a universal ‘now’? In this essay, Sutter ponders and plays with the idea of the fleeting and ephemeral now.
Slip: Notes on Dancing Out of Frame
Movement and time come together again in this essay as Riddhi Dastidar writes about the parallel space that dance can take you to. They capture the euphoria of dance, its slipperiness, and the possibilities it offers of inhabiting different narratives.
Until next time,
Team Dark ‘n’ Light