Juliana Cerqueira Leite

Vestibule - Epicycle, 2017

Vestibule - Epicycle, 2017 was commissioned by the Antarctic biennale and premiered aboard a ship traveling through the Antarctic Penninsula. This 30 minute video cycle was produced by working alongside a group of dancers, actors, survival training experts at Survival Systems Inc. and Jennifer Kellow, Alexander Technique instructor. The film focuses on disorientation, re-orientation, and shifts in perspective, drawing analogies between being upside down, reorienting posture, and different views of the solar system - pre-Copernican and Copernican.

Without narration, the film follows a short training exercise in surviving helicopter emergency landings or crashes in water. Helicopters immediately turn upside down once in water and pilots and crew must know how to orient themselves in an upside down environment in order to escape. We are then led to an Alexander Technique class for two students, who learn how the spine can re-align itself under the skull creating a more relaxed and responsive posture. The cycle concludes with a dance sequence filmed in Central Park and inside of a dark warehouse where dancers perform the motions of planets in the solar system as seen with the Earth at the center of the solar system and then with the earth in motion as one of the many planets.

Exhibitions

Antarctic Biennale, 2017