Film, Olivia Davis & Yuka Hayashi
Note from the artists:
Myopia is a short film developed from the text woven through a dialogical process between two journals by Olivia and Yuka. The text is narrated in the film, while it is layered with landscapes of a spring walk and a dancing body.
The camera lens tests out multiple proximities with what it meets inside a room and outside. Different lives and proximities are juxtaposed through editing in the process of filmmaking, which corresponds to the process of dialogical collaborative writing.
A part of the text and the title are inspired by the book Stigmata written by Hélène Cixous (1998, published by Routledge), specifically the chapter WRITING BLIND: Conversation with the donkey (translated by Eric Prenowitz).
Spoken Text:
The Magic of spring.
I tried to reach it. There was no specific meaning, but there was everything I needed to hear then. Something. I tried to expand the language.
The grass is already green, the sun out for longer, and flowers bursting to their bloom. The imagery is poetry. And it kept going even when it’s stopped.
I will see the colors continuously changing. It slows and returns. I can see
anything when I can’t see something.
I want to watch the grass turn green beneath my feet, but I always forget until the grass is already green. Maybe next year I’ll remember. I’ll follow the distance. Myopia.
I’m disoriented. They’re speaking something somehow. I listened to imagery.
Their writing. I don’t know what I’m seeing right now. Right now is the time. But so is tomorrow and the day after that.
Beyond disorientation, I saw the imagery is language. Suggesting the ultimate proximity on the page of my eyelid.
Too close to see, too many to tell.
Olivia Davis and Yuka Hayashi met while studying at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance in London, England, where they are both getting their master’s in creative practice.
Olivia is a transdisciplinary creative facilitator and performer. She studied theatre (B.A.) at South Dakota State University (Brookings, SD, United States) with extra emphasis in dance and business. Her recent research has investigated the relationship between facilitating transdisciplinary performance creation and experiential learning; recent self-directed work integrates text and movement. (Instagram: @liv.vies)
Yuka is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist/researcher. While engaging with improvisational performance recently, Yuka’s work also includes writing and filmmaking as embodied practices. Yuka explores how the fleshy presence and experience of the writer/maker and reader/audience coexist through dance, poetry, and film. Yuka is originally from Tokyo and has been based in London since 2022. (Instagram: @yuka.h_23)
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