An invitation to listen

In 2017 the composer Matthew Whiteside invited me to make a film for a live performance of his new composition Entangled responding to the work of his great uncle the physicist John Bell. The work was made for the opening of the Northern Ireland Science Festival.

In this kind of work I’m always thinking about how I might invite the audience to listen in different ways.

The film is written as a visual counterpoint rather than a representation of music. It works very differently to a real-time feedback set up where music and film are working in tandem through a computer programme.

Visualising Physics

The three movements are called Waves, Spooky Action and Spinning and I did a lot of reading about quantum entanglement to try to understand what I might look for in either creating an image for animations or in sourcing archive footage.

This reading was in popular science books as I have absolutely no background in science.  The writer I connected to most was Carlo Rovelli, his writing is poet and philisophical and the language gave me clues as to what to look for in archive footage. 

I decided to use one main source only for each movement, a 45 second clip of a couple dancing from 1908, which was also the period when the new physics was emerging. The spinning action, the tension between the dancers, the dynamics of their dance,and the flaws in the footage make for a rich visual source.

Composing in the edit

I edit in relation to multiple layers within the score. Different image layers doing different jobs, there are 10 layers working simultaneously across the 15 minutes.

It’s very unusual for me to work without diegetic sound being embedded in the fabric of a film, seeing is multi-sensory action, however I got my head round this by of conceiving of Entangled as a silent film.

I'm originally a choreographer and I approached making the films for Entangled in the same way as I would composing a choreography. The first thing I did was attend a rehearsal of the score. Hearing the score live and getting a sense of the physicality of the musicians, how they connect to each other and how different instruments transmit different aspects of the work gives me clues about how it might be imaged.