Logan makes integrated dance + camera works that holistically consider the camera and its bodily, emotional, and political impacts in the making process. She employs the camera as an anti-oppression tool: one that participates in challenging the dominant gaze by considering and incorporating the experiences and desires of the viewed; by developing intimacy and familiarity with the camera by all parties involved in a work; and by queering traditional subject/object roles. She is invested in supporting womxn as camera operators, directors, producers, and editors in telling their own stories and in creating experimental art works that misuse the archival tools that have historically positioned them as object.
Dance + Camera works are actualized in Dance Films, Video/Camera Dramaturgy, Documentation, Camera Performance, and Logan’s iterative experimental dance + camera work, The Maya Project.
Dance Film
Logan brings dance composition and improvisation into relationship with the camera in dance film works, creating individualized camera behavior vocabularies, and acknowledging the camera as an instrumental element of the movement story. In her integrative screendance processes, the camera is a compositional tool through both filmic and choreographic elements, including cinematic and photographic languages of framing, focus, and depth of field, as well as a dance-informed sense of weight, time, and spatial relationship. She considers the frame of the camera as a movement partner with an ability to address quality, texture, speed, and agility.
Video/Camera Dramaturgy
As a video dramaturg and camera choreographer, Logan works closely with directors and choreographers to utilize the camera in a way that best fits their work, considering the camera as an innovative tool, including and beyond traditional cinematography and dance documentation. In this work she acts as an art-making partner, considering the possibilities and limitations of dance film, mediated performance, live camera feed, and video installation.
Camera Performance
In performance, Logan uses the camera onstage as a way of calling attention to multiple perspectives. Through live-feed projection or to-be-seen experimental documentation, the camera as a performance tool can be used to uplift the points of view of the viewed, can call attention to sections of a staged performance through altering scale, or can act as a provocateur.
The Maya Project
The Maya Project is an experimental dance and camera methodology that interrogates culturally dominant gazes. Collaborators engage in theory, discussion, and physical inquiry that considers the camera as a tool of power, acknowledging the historical impacts of subject/object relationships, recognizing the frame as an includer/excluder, and examining their own embodied experiences of seeing and being seen. The methodology has been employed in workshops around camera composition and unpacking power and representation, as well as live performances and video installation.
More on The Maya Project
KATHRYN NUSA LOGAN 