Cadence (collaboration)
Rhythm and flow
It is when I collaborate with others that my voice finds a rhythm and flow it cannot find on its own. My voice rises to meet my collaborators and a convergence of all the artists that exist within me – the photographer, the filmmaker, the poet, the songwriter– emerges in full force.
Film is the medium where this cadence comes to life for me most prominently.
Over the last 28 years I have made an array of films and videos – experimental works, documentaries, and dramatic shorts.
Below is a sampling of some of those pieces.
Seeing Staccato gracefully captures an illustrator’s creative process while attempting to transcribe the movement of drawing into the movements of music. (B & W, 16 mm, 8 min.)
Ariel’s Dream (previously titled The Music Lesson), like a chord in the making, unfolds in three distinct vignettes where each character, an old theater custodian, a young prop master, and an elderly Irish woman – are mysteriously called to reconcile with their pasts. (Color, 16 mm transfer to HD, 38 min.).
First Cut, my most recent work, is a meditative documentary that explores the themes of photography, memory, loss and time, through a photograph of a boy’s first haircut.
Using the photograph as its point of departure, First Cut looks at the filmic concepts of “the gaze,” “the close-up” and “over-exposure” and applies them to the human condition - to our search for meaning and deep connection “in a world that will wound us if we let it.” (Color, HD, 15 min.)
Hear Me Out!
Hear Me Out! was a fundraising campaign for a writing program at the Albany Middle School in Albany, CA in 2012, that was possible only through collaborations with the following groups: the WriterCoach Connection, Community Alliance for Learning, the Albany Chamber of Commerce, the Albany School District, local politicians, merchants, teachers and poets, the Thousand Oaks Baptist Church and the East Bay Circle of Men.
Hear Me Out! at its core, however, was a poetry writing boot camp for youth. Middle-schoolers, over a ten-week period
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were mentored by local poets
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wrote and revised their poems
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practiced reading their poems powerfully aloud
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compiled their poetry into a chapbook
The culmination of all their efforts and the Hear Me Out! campaign itself, manifested in an event where the young poets (as the featured artists) read their newly published poems to a packed auditorium.