Change the Lighting

Self expression or self discovery?

Feb 17, 2026

This was meant to be an experiment, but in the end, I was so delighted with both the process and the outcome that I decided to post.

I’ve been playing with turning movement into writing and writing into movement. But as it always does, the creative process had more to say. Here’s how it unfolded.

I met my friend Laura Cannon at the studio and read her the poem “Change the Lighting” by Brooke McNamara. We then went about turning each line of the poem into embodied movement - me directing, her working through movement.

With each line, either Laura would come up with an impulse, or I would direct her into an impulse, translating the poems’ words into the felt sense or essence of them.

For example, at the beginning, when it says change the light by which you read your story, Laura was aware of where the light in the room was hitting her face in the movement before, so the next movement was driven by changing where the light was hitting her face.

Once we had built out two or three lines, I would have her repeat them over and over as I tried to find the right way to capture it with the camera.

Once we had captured a section, we would move on to the next few lines.

In this way, we slowly built out the choreography and the filming of it.

Originally, I imagined stringing together each short section of video, then overlaying it with background music and a voiceover of the poem. But in the end, we had both worked out choreography - her for movement, me for the camera - so I decided to do one final take where I filmed the whole thing start to finish.

The continuity of a single shot felt much more compelling in the storytelling sense so that’s the footage I decided to work with. It also made it very simple to overlap music and voiceover.

Start to finish - from entering the studio to developing the choreography, to filming, to editing - this creative process took 3 hours.

An unintended outcome of this process was what Laura learned about herself in the process of creation and how those realizations influenced my storytelling with the camera.

First, a little background. Laura is an accomplished site-specific artist - see another short video we collaborated on that tells her story here - yet she is currently at a turning point where she is shedding some of her previous identities to make room for what comes next.

Coming up with the very first movement is the hardest because the options are so wide open. Laura’s initial impulse was to start the piece against the wall. She moves along it, runs into it, slides down it, experiments with different ways it can hold her up before finally moving away from it at the line, let this light reveal the rapture of being just this.

This is the point we discovered the true significance of her initial impulse. The wall represented her security blanket and all the self-perceptions and identities she keeps clinging to. Moving away from it felt naked and vulnerable, but she began exploring, trying to welcome what that could be, returning to the wall only briefly on the line no matter who you think you are.

My camera work begins mostly with shots at eye-level. I’m observing and listening, leaning in, then panning out to see the bigger picture. After we discovered the significance of her moving away from the wall, my camera angle intentionally shifts to the side to show that distance.

Then I become an active participant in charting new territory. There’s a little bit of chaos in the camera movement as I try to show her vulnerability by being above her, then getting back at her level, before finally sliding across the floor on my back to get a low angle looking up.

That last angle, which in film is often used to show the subject as powerful or heroic, comes right at the line however you may change, or not.

While I did set out to tell a story through dance, what actually happened was that Laura’s body revealed the part of her story that needed to be told.

Does it make you wonder what your body knows about you that you haven’t yet asked it?