Grant awarded to: Lauren Heckler
Ymddiried’s Contribution: £3,000
I am grateful to Ymddiried for having supported my MA Screendance (2024) studies by awarding me £2,500 towards course costs, and £500 towards personal circumstances. MA Screendance at London Contemporary Dance School was a unique media learning experience, which introduced me to technical, practical and theoretical skills spanning across the work of Director, DOP, Producer, First AD, Gaffer, Runner, Intimacy Coordinator, and Film Festival Programmer, whilst always building out from my own arts practice and challenging me to meet and support the creative voices of my peers.
Hype is the short film I directed, produced and edited as part of our Making Screendance module. Studying film as ‘screendance’ meant we were encouraged to initiate our processes from the body. This film was born from my feelings, experiences and reflections, at the two-year marker of life with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). T1D forms the fabric of the work, from an electronic dance track by Alice Go, made by close mic recording insulin pens, finger prickers and CGMs, to choreography informed by daily management gestures, and rhythmic cuts inspired by the pixilation sensation of hypoglycaemia. It was my first go at disability-led filmmaking and with a large cast and crew, many of whom had different chronic illnesses. The disability-conscious production methods that I developed continue to inform my making. On a personal level, the fund helped to minimise T1D burnout, as I was able to rest between focusing on my studies, rather than chasing employment to help fund my production costs and diabetic needs.
Concepts like the somatic camera, kino-eye and camera-dancer mixed together to influence my practice-research project exploring the camera as a vector that transmits ideas, habits, suspicions, biases, power, curiosities, and pleasure. They also got me asking how cameras, in this case a mixture of Sony, Canon and Black Magic DSLRs, can be collaborators in the forming of exciting and intimate relationships between people, and people and places. In London, I workshopped this idea through improvised and scored camera-dancer duet sessions in studios and treescapes. Through the support of this fund, I was then able to transform the learning into an explorative residency in Llansteffan, here working with movement and/or film artists Eddie Ladd, Mari Northall and Lydia Newman.
Expanding out from these experiences, I have worked as a screendance mentor for Eddie Ladd and a camera assistant for the Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage commission, Dancing through time: Returning to Pina Bausch’s Kontakthoff. I am self-producing, shooting and editing a Welsh language documentary about the Llansteffan Coastguard Rescue Service commissioned by Am, The Digital Home for Welsh Culture, and have also been working as crew for a Channel 4 drama and reality hybrid.