DAMMERÜNG (2020) is a dance film which I choreographed, scored, and directed from my rooftop in East Harlem during the height of the pandemic. 

I was inspired by the sense of loneliness I would feel sitting up on my roof hearing the sounds of the street below me. Everything felt so far away and out of touch in this time. I wanted to create a piece that tapped into the fantasy of alienation; to physicalize the way that self-othering can be darkly transformative. The rooftop would become the site of otherworldly visions, slowly unveiling bizarre scenarios centered around a mournful ghost. The figure oscillated between something very alien and a deeper sense of humanity, painting the space with both the real and the magical.

I designed the projected visuals entirely in the visual programming environment, Touchdesigner. The images employed a technique called trompe l’oeil to create an illusion of a different geometry of the space when viewed from a specific angle. This served to confuse and suspend a sense of the space and its gravity.