Tracking Parallel 2025

https://vimeo.com/1019182047 (password is ADDICTED TO ECT)

Over the past year, Richard Ducker has been working with New York-based contemporary dance choreographer Heidi Latsky investigating the relationship between the moving body in space and the moving image on screen. Rather than documenting a single performance Ducker looks to find an equivalence between the two mediums.

Heidi Latsky works with a range of dancers who are diverse in race, age and body shape that at times deliberately question the usual archetypes of dance movement. Tracking Parallel was originally devised to make a work about the parallel lives we all led during the enforced isolation of the Covid lockdowns, but it gained more immediacy in response to Heidi’s own recent health crisis. Dance is perhaps the oldest and most primal form of human expression. It is an act of freedom, of escaping constraint, and in this context an articulation of what it means to be alive. The work speaks to personal survival in states of contingency and temporal fragility.

The film explores this through a visual lexicon that examines how the image functions in time within the fluid nature of performance. Using the moving image as a device of seduction and spectacle, the body here is both sensual and corporeal. It articulates being inside a performance where it is the fragments of expression that present its precariousness.

Tracking Parallel, 36 mins, 2025