Lip Dancing
The video Lip Dancing (formerly titled Rising Sun) appears to be a simple work, "yet behind this surface, there is a lot more than this." This 3.20-minute video produced by the media artist Jolanta Lapiak in 2003 states the following:
A hearing friend Kevin Wallace handed me his poem Rising Sun specifically written for me to translate it in ASL. His poem was written in English words but in ASL grammar. He said, "I want to see what it looks like in your signing (American Sign Language)." With his permission to use his poem, I took further by creating a work of art for another purpose.
Each of us speaks vocally or manually using our bodies as the medium of communication. Everyone has accustomed of reading aloud in English and Ameslan people have read aloud English into ASL (through the interpreting or translating process which takes a different cerebral process). However, when I read out his ASL-designated poem, translating his poem was a striking experience that it was not my voice. I became his voice and experienced his voice. My body was the medium of his, like a typewriter, paper and pen, or another writing instrument. Transmutation.
This video contains the visual-manual speaker myself and the vocal-auditory speaker yet there is no audio. He is silent when he speaks; on the other hand, she is non-silent when she signs. What does silence connotes? It undermines the notion of the meaning of silence -- not the absence of sound but the notion of...
One of the common comments from my fellow artists (viewers) is that the signing (or manually speaking) is like dancing, that is like "hand dancing." It was disturbing for some reason, I thought at first. After contemplating about their view and about my reaction to their view, finally I came up with the title, "Lip Dancing" to counter-illustrate their view.
It brought me to think further about what "dance" really is and what choreography can do. It led to some of my later works that experimented with choroegraphic elements of languages, including Ameslan (ASL) and English.
References
Photographs and statement by Jolanta Lapiak at www.lapiak.com.