By Phillipe Roberts
Powering his way through the ghostly interior of the 17th century Hendrick I. Lott House in Southern Brooklyn, dancer Kingsley Ibeneche contorts, writhes, and floats his way through a foreboding piece of electronic music. As he slashes through the darkness, the music builds from a slight, almost ambient hum into a ghoulish symphony of whirring synthesizers, gloomy bass, and the nauseous pulse of detuned accordion. A poem, Secret Love by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, is recited, but chopped and manipulated into a linguistic maze yielding only cryptic phrases. “There was none,” echoes the voice, whipping Kingsley into a frenzy of motion, tearing and clawing at his body, pulling at his face to exorcise an unspeakable pain in breathtaking close-ups. As he lumbers back into the chair from which he began his dance, the drone and voice gradually sinking into nothingness, a sense of eerie calm and awe sinks in.
Embodied by Kingsley’s virtuosic movements and visualized by the meticulous eye of local director Katie Sadler as part of the Campfire Poetry project, the agony and madness at the heart of Secret Love are brought into stunning detail with a liveliness that isn’t apparent at first read of the 19th century poem. Campfire Poetry aims to create unique video works centered on dramatic readings of poetry by building a bucket brigade of collaborators who interpret the work in a gradual process. First, voiceovers of poems are created and then handed off to composers to edit and score as they see fit. This music is then passed to a dancer, who choreographed original pieces to accompany the sounds. Finally, a director is brought in to film the performance.
Sadler was brought on board to Campfire Poetry in what she says is the only time an artist freelancing site has worked out for her (she’s since canceled her membership to that site). She chose the poem out of a selection of works presented to her by producer Max Rothman, but didn’t immediately see the connection herself. “I chose a few poems that I really liked, but then I heard the music,” she explains, “It just didn’t match what I felt when reading the poem or what I hoped would accompany it.”
But then she happened upon Secret Love. “The actual contents of the poem didn't make me think twice,” she says, “until I heard the music. I could imagine choreography immediately.” The track, with its rhythmic grind and colorful textural pallet, clicked.
On a thematic level, the tragedy inherent in the piece’s focus on unrequited love immediately create a broad sense of relatability, but it was the sense of ambiguous loss at its core that stuck out to Sadler. “It's about restlessness, mania, and things that keep you up at night,” she points out, “It's about things that are left unsaid. It's about mourning over something that was never yours in the first place.” She was hooked.
Brought up as a competitive dancer with a focus on classical ballet, Sadler’s filmmaking developed during her education at NYU, where she took the notorious Sight and Sound course, leading to her integrating her dance studies into the filmmaking process for the first time. For a dancer wracked with uncertainty over whether to abandon a passion that had begun to fade in favor of a new artistic direction, the course was a eureka moment. “I realized that I didn't have to choose,” she says, proudly “I can combine them because they work so well together.”
Though that dance training had once been a point of confusion, it was instrumental in guiding Sadler’s decision-making on this project. “I knew that someone with classical training wasn't going to work for this piece,” she says, “I wanted it to be very syncopated and to play with the rhythm of the poem in a similar way to how the track sounds.” But when Max showed her Kingsley via Instagram, it was an immediate yes, even though the two weren’t able to discuss the collaboration until the shoot itself.
Even with this unforeseen limitation on the project, once the two met in person, their connection was immediate and left a huge impression. “We had time to talk about themes, both the themes of the poem and the themes of the movements,” she explains, describing how she’d broken down the poem into thematic sections and given Kingsley specific "hit points" to work with. Rolling on the first take to capture the unexpected, instinctual magic that sometimes strikes, they held their breath. Kingsley nailed it. “He performed the piece for the first time and blew the entire crew on set away,” Sadler says, still awe-struck at the strength of his vision, “there was a moment of silence afterwards when our jaws were hanging open and then we all just erupted in excitement.”
With a few adjustments coming through on each of the four takes shot that day, the piece, entirely composed of improvisation, wrapped quickly for a lengthy edit process. “This project was more of a challenge to edit than anything else,” Sadler explains, “You have to edit to the movement of the dancer, the rhythm of the music, and the meter of the poem.”
The complex system of edits took time, but the result is a fantastic emotional journey, powered by Kingsley’s flawless improvisation and the care that Sadler takes to transport the viewer into the deepening despair of the poem with inventive angles and an intimate focus on tunneling into Kingsley’s personal horror. A lovely nightmare brimming with the sharp anxieties of love, Secret Love is a triumph.
