What happens when everything stops?
STILL STANDING 2
A FILM PROJECT ON EMBODYING STILLNESS
by Shabari Rao & Navya Sah
with Noor Sengupta
Still Standing Series Conception - Shabari Rao
Located in Bangalore, India
Still Standing revealed itself as a series of multimodal works. Each successive work is born out of the previous one and carries traces of the ones that came before it. This is the second work in the series. Still Standing 2 is an experimental video work. It was born out of a performance project (Still Standing 1).
Can stillness in performance be compelling?
When there is no narrative, no scene, no character, not even emotion or even much movement, what arises?
How does stillness get magnified with so many bodies in the space?
With Still Standing 2, the intention was to create a video that was more than documentation, A creative endeavour in itself, offering the viewer an experience that was whole, not a voyeuristic experience of something that had already happened. And yet this experience is rooted in what has happened before. It can be thought of as the findings of an embodied research process. The questions that shaped this process were:
How do we make an embodied experience available to people who are temporally distant, who inhabit a different time and space?
How does the viewer’s experience intersect with the performers’ experiences?
Watch full film here.
Published in Indent, Present Continuous Issue 2