Solitude Sometimes

Rha is the most important among the deities related to the sun: he is the one of midday, when the star is high on the zenith and at the height of its power. In the video created for Solitude Sometimes, OOOPStudio recounts the journey that the god carries out to bring light into the two worlds, the earth and the afterlife. The style used is minimalist, albeit with a careful choice of moments and transitions. The essential narration respects the journey undertaken by the god from east, where the sun borns, to west, where it sets and dies, ploughing the waters of the Nile on his golden boat until arriving into the duat, the underworld into which he enters at night to bring light to the damned from sunset to dawn.

The solar cycle of the day is described by an intro of illusory emptiness in which there is only a blinding white light, a luminous backdrop against which the silhouettes of the dancers are standing out. Colour, or non-colour, is used in its most extreme tones, pure and burnt, hefty and palpable: the white light is not emptiness nor absence, but it symbolises the beginning of the day and the journey that Rha runs until dusk. Gradually, the transition to night is realised through a succession of increasingly rapid glitches until darkness takes over, represented by the black colour and swallowing up the light. Noise effects are here used as a generative element to develop results that are as fluid as they are edgy, like a paste contrasting with the rigidity of the pixel that forms it, representing the obstacles and dangers that the god must overcome in the underworld, struggling to emerge from the darkness and return to shine. In the night his presence is never annihilated but weak, appearing in a fragmentary way until, at the end of his journey, the day starts again: slowly, white returns to make room until it fills the entire screen, marking the new beginning.

The video for Solitude Sometimes, a new production for Teatro alla Scala in Milan, is the result of a collaboration between OOOPStudio and Carlo Cerri with the German choreographer Philippe Kratz, for the ballet he conceived on music by Thom Yorke, Modeselektor and Radiohead.

In this work, OOOPStudio takes the usual black-white colour scheme to the extreme, leaving much to light and allowing only a few chromatic aberrations within glitch and transition effects.

Following the sound path cut through the electronic music, the video directly and tangibly beats the times associated with dance, while admitting moments of fading and merging and others of suspension alternating with short timelapses of abstract realities. Even more than the loop, it is the fraction that gives rhythm and emphasises the resilient cyclical nature of Kratz’s creation, inspired by the Egyptian tradition of the Sun God.