Language Barrier

Language Barrier began as an in-person duet in a dance studio in February 2020 between two first year students. When the first lockdown happened only weeks later we had to start over almost completely from scratch, moving our work online and trying to figure out how we could make the duet work in a digital format. We abandoned all of the contact work we’d been preparing and started putting together snippets of choreography from tasks we set each other over zoom calls. Dance had never been so tedious. When it finally came to filming Divija went silent on me for a day having caught a last minute flight back to India. Almost all of her footage was filmed whilst in isolation in a hotel room, and suddenly we found ourselves with these polarities of freedom and restriction. Our soundtrack was created through both of us recording ourselves saying very random things in every language we knew to build up a cacophony that sounded like the kind of mishmash of language one might hear when in an international airport or city. We combined this with our own movement languages, communicating through gestures and then shared choreography that only sometimes matched up in the recordings. The disparities in timing actually worked in our favour as it gave the feel of picking each other up and then losing each other again in conversation. This collaboration kept both of us going through one of the hardest times in our university experience, and despite the badly angled shots and mediocre quality footage, we still look back on this as one of our best achievements together.