R E A C H
a collaborative poetic film
Hello and happy full moon, dear reader. You’re hearing from me twice this lunar cycle because I’m energized to share the release of a short poetic film I spent the better part of autumn working on with my collaborative partner, Luke Brown. Creating this film was an illuminating process, certainly a labor of love, and now it’s time to share this work with you.
We are humbled and grateful to be featured in three festivals this month along the West Coast! Seattle-based folks, we’d love to see you for our hometown premier at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival in the showcase sculpture of echoes—April 18th, Northwest Film Forum, 7p.
This project was supported by the Artist Trust GAP grant, buoyed by pianist Ran Park with an original score, and filmed with reverence for the Coast Salish landscape.
Through the shifting shape, current, and conduit of water, Reach follows the journey of two people in search of the other. Trails of invisible energy imprint as they maneuver throughout the landscape, leaving hints of mirrored action yet inverted perspective. An exploration into the crossroads of intimacy, two wanderers expand longing into reaching, gesturing toward empowerment in the mysterious search for a resonant, reciprocated touch.
PREMIERING
SEATTLE
Cadence Video Poetry Festival - April 18th, Northwest Film Forum, 7p
VIRUTAL
PORTLAND
Portland Panorama - April 14th, Boathouse Microcinema, 8p
LOS ANGELES
International Poetry Festival - April 24th, Beyond Baroque
Behind the Scenes of Reach
What began as a curious desire to intersect the art of poetry and film shapeshifted into a project of its own form over the course of a season. The day was bright for our ferry over to Orcas Island in mid-September as we wrote our notes for thematic exploration. Body in relation to landscape / to self and greater-than. Vulnerability / Release. Floating / Surrender. Un-layering. To hold emptiness. We discussed the riparian—the place of transition between land and water, where the water directly and slowly influences the shape of the land—and how we could make our bodies like this concept as we opened them to the surrounding landscape.
But as we slipped into the forest on our first day with the 16mm film camera and equipment and awkwardly long stand slung over our shoulders, the intellectual buzz around what we would make softened. We quieted, stepping into the deep plush of damp moss and slunk off trail. We sat by lily pads and watched the rungs of water widen as dew dropped from overhanging cedars. We were moved by a gnarled fir tree dangling over the edge of a cliff above the deep mountain lake. We wondered about light and shadow, movement and stillness. And we discovered a liminal space to hear the subtle voice of the heart—its ache, its want, its strain to preserve hopefulness.
There is no pin-pointed moment of dropping in, away from our original idea and into the project’s rhythm. Maybe it happened when our bodies first hit the water—Luke unraveling from the extended arm of the fir branch, Emily stepping off the splintered edge of the bridge. We listened to each other and the landscape as we went. We learned how to move, to choose, to hover and hold, to reach and retreat intuitively. Behind all of this, two hearts stirred the sediment of difficult lessons through the valves of the body into the scenes. The freezing, thunderous flow of the waterfall shocked us but we stayed under, surrendered to it. We emerged panting, and new.
Art remakes us as we make it. That’s part of why we make it. This project taught us how to release our need to translate an initial vision and instead meander into the pulse of desire without agenda; it taught us how to reach into the invisible precisely because we do not know what is there, what is fecund and alive and possibly reaching back. We revere the innate mystery in art-making just as we revere the search for love—and the reach into the unknown that both require.
‘Til the new moon ~
Amazing, Emily! 🌹