Spirit / Cloud is a two-screen dance-film installation, 15 minutes in length. The content can be experienced as a narrative from beginning to end, or as a continuing loop.
The project is a collaborative work between film-director Sean O’Brien, and dancer-choreographers Tony Yap and Agung Gunawan. The sound design is by Madeleine Flynn and Dr. Tim Humphrey. Sean is from the southern Blue Mountains of NSW, Tony is Australian-Malaysian, and Agung is from central Java, Indonesia. Tim and Madeleine are based in Melbourne.
Spirit / Cloud explores the idea of “melangkoli”, or melancholy, within the body, and within memory. How is one’s emotional and physical state influenced and altered, by loss, by change, by adaptation? The choreography and imagery expresses the loss and change in the dancers’ own lives, in their surrounding culture, and in their surrounding landscape and environment. There is an inevitable moving forward, while retaining a sense of what has gone before.