Swan Lake

Assignment-2
Ashish jaiswal

My firstness of the text was a confused pleased. I was invested from the initial
seconds, a curious took over my brain and I was looking forward to what it had to
say. The intricacies of the movements felt like ballet, but they weren't the ballet we
are used to interacting with. At least keeping the conventional approach to ballet in
mind. The movements were pleasing yet uncomfortable to watch. It was well
coordinated yet unusual. And the way it synced with the mood of the music was
capable of evoking very specific feelings and images with respect to our own
context pool.

Looking at the video from a narrative point of view, due to its low coherence and
high fidelity, it felt like a piece of fiction to me. A fiction that covers the tale of an
entity represented throughout the video through different mediums (mediums being
performers). Its emergence from the chaos, its tiredness due to the process of
coming into existence, tracing its first steps to exploring its potential, its exhaustion
and recovery, its attempts at chasing its dignified glory through the chaos, reaching
and living that glory to its fullest, celebrating the meaning found by the entity and a
satisfying return. These different phases of that entities existence were defined by
the progression of the interaction between the visuals and the sounds in ascending
order. The rounded experience after interacting with the text was a numb for me
and while it did evoke a lot of strong and specific feelings, the more I tried to
define these feelings as a whole, the more ambiguous and abstract it started getting
for me. It was like a plethora of very specific flavours composed in a manner that
vaguely points you towards linearity, but only if you intentionally attempt towards
it. And in my opinion, most of the credit behind this goes to the sheer entropic
nature of the content of the text. The representation was graceful yet difficult to
relate to. The quality of impersonation by the performers was spotless. Even
though it’s hyperbole, to casually describe the performance, I might just find
myself using a phrase like “dancing swans”.
The text can also be interpreted as a visual representation of swans stuck inside a
closed space with no way out, living out their entire lives in a bathtub, which also
resonates with the situation human beings are currently in and also the premise of
the video, being completely filmed remotely during the covid-19 pandemic. And
since according to this interpretation humans metaphorically swans in the video,
we can also see traces of toxic realism to idealism considering the commonality in
the body types throughout the performers, promoting body negativity on a
thirdness level of semiotic interpretation.

The set design throughout the montage was smartly done with a simple motif being
the bathtub and the slightly blue water in it. Even though every video piece in the
montage has something unique to say, it all fits well together at the end because of
this motif and the theme of the montage and how the cinematography works to lure
you so into it that you stop noticing these inequalities after a point and start
forming links and connections between all the various clips and visual effects.
Even music plays a huge role in this. The music, being the most redundant out of
everything this piece had to put out, becomes a familiar link with what’s about to
come and also becomes the defining factor behind the moods and the energy of the
entire piece.

After analysing the video from a couple of different points of view, I realised that it
was a very well rounded and thought through piece of art. From the romanticism of
the organic concept of a human being in a bathtub with bluish water, moving
gracefully in an attempt to imitate a swan to the structural integrity of repeated
symmetry in the editing of the video, every bit was executed in a manner that
compliments the other. Apart from the choice of a toxic ideal body type of the
performers I had nothing to be negatively critical of. Interacting with the video
with analytical lenses was enriching and helped me become critical about
something so very beautiful to experience.