Updates, Live: Open the Door

Yoko opens door after door, coming from long empty corridors, or long narrow streets, sometimes full of people, sometimes void, just bordered by long glass walls.

Nothing happens, there is no story in this video, just doors and corridors. And it's a great video, one that remains in your inner, long after you've watched it: its rhythm remains in your inner, to tick in you madly, like a spell.

Art isn't always about our need for stories; sometimes it's about our need for spatial order, for structures that define some spatial order. Musical structures create spatial order, and dance performances also create such structures.

This video creates structures of tempo and images, it is the perfect rhythmic movement of Yoko in a universe of perfect symmetry: symmetric doors and symmetric walls and symmetric corridors, and stairs.

Watch this video with its music and then cut the sound: you'll have the same feeling, of musical-like structures; the movements of Yoko and the angles chosen for the images create a musical piece even without sounds.

Some great masterpieces come to my mind: first of all, Symphonie Diagonale of Viking Eggeling, but a much closer example would be the Meditation on Violence of Maya Deren (or her Study in Choreography for Camera).

But the video of Yoko is Japanese and it carries the same concerns Japanese art has for expressing the ideas of cosmic order sublimated in the shape of a curve on an object, in the dialog among lines and curves on different objects gathered on purpose; and the objects can be here the corridors and the streets, with noisy people or empty; each shape, human, or not, communicates with the others and participates in the whole. And I start to understand better why Ozu is so Japanese specific while showing only modern streets with Westernized people. Look just at this image, below: Yoko in the universe of Ozu!