To Be Watched While Eating an Orange is a multiple pathway storytelling told through screendance.

Part of Dance Screen Space symposium

Artist statement

This MediaWall installation is collaboration between dancer Cathy Nicoli, musician and composer Jeff Boehm, and screendance artist Christopher Lewis-Smith.

Originally shot as a seventeen-minute single take film in an old warehouse in Rhode Island, this re-constructed version uses additional footage shot at the time.

The work explores the portrait format of MediaWall as a space for screendance narrative. The multiple screens present parallel versions of the same event that do not quite unfold in the same way or at the same time. The moving images are glued together by Boehm’s soundtrack that defines new qualities to the dance, the place, and the overall narrative.

This work will also be used as supporting media for the paper 'Including the Sky' by Chris Lewis-Smith, which will discuss portrait versus landscape as narrative screen space and will include what he sees as a collision of formats in the construction and experience of screendance.

On the blog

Chris discusses the innovation in using MediaWall's vertical format in a blog post for Bath Spa. 

About the Dance Screen Space symposium

To Be Watched While Eating An Orange was screened at a three-day symposium (19-21 June 2018) led by Christopher Lewis-Smith and award-winning writer and filmmaker Katrina McPherson.

The event was a practical two-day screendance making workshop, and a one-day knowledge exchange between graduates from different countries. This will include (to date) Ireland, Palestine, USA, Columbia, Brazil, China, Indonesia and the UK. The knowledge exchange included screenings and dissemination of work, including To Be Watched While Eating An Orange.