Alex and I have been in conversation and ongoing research for this project for almost two years now. We share a love of literature, a resource for ideas and structures with which we can then map our own pathways. One of our “ways in” to creating a foundation for this film was through Ruth Ozeki’s work A Tale for the Time Being, a novel that deals with notions of time. Here is one of many passages we are holding close. It comes from Dögen Zenji, Uji (1200-1253), founder of Japanese Soto Zen. Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time, they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.  A Tale for the Time Being (p. 259).

Alex and I have been in conversation and ongoing research for this project for almost two years now. We share a love of literature, a resource for ideas and structures with which we can then map our own pathways. One of our “ways” to creating a foundation for this film was through Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, a novel that deals with notions of time. Here is one of many passages we are holding close. It comes from Dögen Zenji, Uji (1200-1253), founder of Japanese Soto Zen.  Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time, they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being. A Tale for the Time Being(p. 259).      

I often work to take less mobile, more heady ideas and turn them into motional investigations. Fleeting is an action-based term – an adective describing the notion of time being – for humans, being. Fleeting describes the nature of time without creating separation between us, and time, or between us and various times. And that is, at essence, where we are heading as we set out to craft an expression of time in dance for the camera.

So we start with research, but we don’t choreograph the research. We distill; we enliven; we set in motion. We also ask questions, like: How might we use a house as the “stage” to show simultaneous time, or the parallel nature of past, present and future? And… How many lives can one place hold?