Skin, Bones, and Peanut Butter
Overview: A compilation of my personal journal entries, typed and set to a remix of Swan Lake, interspersed with pictures of dancers. The main objective of this project is to help my little sister overcome her body image issues based on her older sister's (my) experiences.
Research and Creative Process: I was flipping through my old journals and came across several passages about my struggle with anorexia nervosa that included my daily weight. Eating disorders had been a part of my life for nearly a decade, mostly a product of the images of ballerinas I was obsessed with and societal messaging. I have since seen these messages affecting the way my little sister (6 years younger than me) sees herself at the same age. I pulled passages, instances, and quotes from my journal and experimented with a variety of ways to present these ideas. I tried filming my handwriting (which ended up being too sloppy), cutting up pieces of paper to make sentence constructions a stop-motion film style, and eventually those led to the cleaner, typed version. The video came together inspired by the many "Audio Only" music videos that have recently been released by several artists to accompany music videos. The audio-only versions frequently contain the lyrics to a song, but since my struggle with eating disorders was a silent one, I opted not to narrate the text, only show it. I also mixed up the timeline and the dates to form a narrative that is not necessarily linear, but reads like it could be, a sort of illusion. The motif of peanut butter appears frequently throughout because it is my sister's favorite food, and also one of mine.
The other visual aspect I incorporated were the highly edited stationary images of myself dancing between each "journal entry." I inserted these pictures to give the film a surrealist element, as the photos are at times not easy to understand, and attach the story to a visual image beyond the text.
For the audio, I found a remix of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake that I danced to frequently during my career as a dancer, and I further edited the audio to my tastes, finally setting the type and pictures to the track. Swan Lake was an intentional choice in that it is a famous, old story ballet, and it features a character who changes forms and eventually dies.
Final Product: Using the past as a way to re-create the future, I saw my struggles as a potential mirror for my sister's onset of worries with her body, and I hope it is effective in the lives of others as the "story" comes full-circle. By using my own life as a basis, I hope to give the video an authenticity and emotion that can only come from my personal experiences. This again connects to my theme of dance and the idea that our bodies are not separate from our minds.