Experimenting On Site & in the Studio

Participants working in the YAF Studio

Over the past two days, we have been on site and in the studio with the Aedas My Footsteps participants. It's been fast and furious. We are already about halfway done with the work we are creating together. For the first part of day one, we had several discussions about the nature of site work and the particular site for this project. We gave a short overview of our research into the history and features of the space, and together, all took a tour of the BNP Paribas museum of Bethanie at the location in Pok Fu Lam.

Then, we began our site observation and initial site explorations. Afterwards, we returned to the studio to further explore movement motifs and gestures that were informed by the site, and worked through methods of translating those ideas into short, repeatable movement sequences which we also tweaked compositionally to discover various ways of putting them together.

Yesterday was day two of the process, and we started as a group in the front of Bethanie, working our individual phrases into a group sequence and fitting that to the front veranda and facade. You can see our early experiments in the video below.

Afterwards, we split up into groups on site in order to maximize our time, experimenting with the various architectural and compositional possibilities throughout the verandas, hallways and in the chapel. We finished the day again back at the YAF studio where we worked with several groups of participants to deepen the movement we'd created on site earlier in the day. Whew!

-Tom