very

'very' was shot on 8mm film and then enlarged to 16mm to accentuate the photographic grain. It was shot through a mask of variable width that allowed the view to be obscured to a greater or lesser degree (shades of Pyramus and Thisbe!) Shooting was only ever from one point of view, a restriction evoking the experience of a member of the dance audience. Silence in the film is underlined by fitting only a few passages with sound and music.

The film hopes to invite the viewer to fill in what is out of sight, and so build images in the mind – enough information to lead to shrewd guesswork, or even to stimulate speculation, which is to say, to allow for choreography in the mind’s eye.

The persistence of the dancer from one shot to the next is, in film-making generally, a highly evolved means to an illusory end – that is, the illusion that what you see is “real”, that what went before follows seamlessly and in reality from one moment to the next. Of course that is almost never true, as anyone will now know, though not be much aware of when watching a film. In this case however, cuts to black ('visual silences', as it were), and fragmentation, prevent such comforts. Instead the clues must be pieced together, organised and arranged by the mind, in the mind, with the aid of memory.

The process of watching is thus a necessary part of the piece itself; the act of looking a performance.

The film can also be seen as an attempt to convey or reproduce the often elusive nature of a first encounter: the film is an accumulation fleeting glimpses.

The sound track originally featured a few sections of synchronised sound – footfalls and breath. A selection of Hungarian Songs, composed and performed by Matteo Fargion, were laid in at regular intervals. Later however, in 2000, the current sound track was made, which uses purely instrumental music, also written by Matteo Fargion. The distribution of music follows the same pattern as in 1994.

As Robert Bresson told Michel Ciment: It is the impression of a thing and not the thing itself that matters. The real is something we make for ourselves. Everyone has their own. There is the real and there is our version of it.

dancers: Lynn Bristow, Deborah Jones, Jonathan Burrows

choreography: Jonathan Burrows

music: Matteo Fargion

music performed by Charles Mutter & Sally Rose / London New Music

sound mix: Hugh Strain at De Lane Lea

director/camera/editing: Adam Roberts

Filmed and edited 1994, soundtrack revised and remixed 2000.