Tiffany Smith, In the Eye
In normal years, Kindling Arts Festival brings us several days of top-notch theater and dance performances that showcase the city’s formidable talent. Like so many of our local arts institutions, Kindling has adapted its programming to suit our stay-at-home lives, with excellent virtual performances like Sweet Relief: Dances for the Wash Room and Amanda Card’s Lil Amanda Is a Potty Mouth (both of which you can view on the Kindling Arts Festival YouTube channel).
The festival’s latest offering comes from its longtime collaborators Suspended Gravity, a movement group featuring some of Nashville’s finest who incorporate elements of the circus in their performances. In the Eye features five new works that were filmed around Nashville. Each work strikes a different tone — while Patrick Gun’s corde lisse performance takes place in an intimate bedroom, we find Michael West Jr. suspended from aerial silks in a wide-open field. These settings are fitting backgrounds for the varied emotional journeys that play out through dance. The performers communicate longing, anxiety and boredom — as well as joy and triumph. It’s a fitting tribute to a year that will soon be in the rearview mirror.
In the Eye is shot by Griffin R. Dunn and also includes performances by Bailey Freeman, Heather McAlister, Paige Muirhead and Tiffany Smith.
Freeman and Muirhead, who are also producers on the project, wrote in a press release: “Despite the fact that we've all been very physically isolated, we think we can say that 2020 itself has been a shared experience unlike anything the world has ever seen. We are all reacting to this shared circumstance in our own ways, sometimes finding pain and sometimes finding joy. We hope that viewers see pieces of themselves in our film, and that it resonates with even just a part of what they've felt this year.”
See the full film below.
