To dance is to be free.
To animate is to breath.
The Latin root for animation, anima, is to breath in and bring to life[1]. The animator’s goal is to bring their imagined characters to life through the creation of life-like movements. Sometimes, without a specific goal or narrative purpose, the animated character simply conveys stories through their movements to express their emotions, to show who they are, and to celebrate the beauty and painfulness of life. To me, it is not hard to conceive of the act of dancing as animating, when animation is understood in its broad philosophical sense.
The Silent Voice of Her Own. My journey as an animator who works closely with dancers started with Rong/Melt (2017), a rotoscoped charcoal animation that retells the myth of Ganjiang and Moye. The myth centers on the Chinese sword-casting legend in which the great swords were made after Moye, the wife of Ganjiang, sacrifices herself to melt the iron by throwing herself into the fire. I was challenged by my mentor, animator and illustrator Yingfang Shen to “think out of the box” after an almost painful storyboarding process, where I could not narrate Moye’s story in the form of a narrative animation by which the character act or speak. Eventually, I saw stills from Pina Bausch’s performance Café Muller and it struck me. Why would I not just let Moye perform without saying a word? Why would she not tell her story with her own body that was sacrificed? I decided to work with a dancer to explore Moye’s movement from the myth. To create the most evocative effect of the movement, the perfect balance of realness and fiction, I chose to rotoscope the dancer’s movement into a charcoal animation. The material and the erasing method of charcoal animation invented by William Kentridge[2] animated the tragic truth of Moye’s body—the female body was sacrificed for and under the patriarch society and was erased repeatedly in our history. Finally, for the sound created by playing xun, an ancient Chinese instrument made from clay, as well as myself scrapping the paper used to animation on to mimic the burning sound, Moye’s body spoke a silent voice of her own.
Dancing in a Strange New World. Since then, I started to creatively investigate the gendered choreography in animation by re-animating the female body based on the live-action footage of real dancers.
The ongoing work of Strange Dwelling (2020-) started at the beginning of the global pandemic in 2020. To ease my anxiety about protecting others from my breath, I used my own breath to blow bubbles out of the mixture of ink and soap water to create spontaneous marks on paper, which are then digitally animated into a 2.5D environment using After Effects. I later invite dancers to freely improvise their emotional responses within the audio-visual space for a live performance with Yaqi Wu, which would later become a hybrid collaboration across geographical spaces in Flow-Together (2021), choreographed, video edited and performed by Becca Weiss and Kelsey Rohr. The animated environment is projected in a space where the dancers become part of the imaginary world by freely interacting and playing with the moving images and with the sound I created, while I continue to make spontaneous marks on paper. I tend to blend the boundary between dance and animation, by having the animation made from the animator’s breath and body movement be used to inspire other bodies to create more movements—this ongoing process demonstrate the close relationship between dance and animation in my work.
In admiration of the intimate and performative process of how early animators performed with their animated characters on screen shown in e.g. the inventor of rotoscope animation Max Fleischer’s series Out of the Inkwell (1918)[3], as well as drawing inspiration from Chinese scholar Liu Shuliang’s term animation’s spirit-offering ceremony (2022)[4], I took a more literal approach to give “life” to the dancers through performing on my own in a multimedia environment as both the animator and narrator. In my MFA thesis project H (2022)[5], I imagined two female characters that could animate the metaphoric female body found in blood from the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament in the Bible and the twelve beauties whose lives were doomed with the destruction of Daguanyuan in Dream of the Red Chamber (1791)[6]. I invited fashion designer Han-Ah Yoo to collaborate with me in the creation of three garments out of sheer organza fabric, which interact with the projection beautifully, and Xinchen Li to help making the jewelry set that I wore in the performance to represent the parallel metaphor found in both of the texts through numbers and ancient Chinese characters. The invisible female bodies in the fictional world find agency through the improvised choreography created by two talented dancers, Tye Trondson and Akiwele Burayidi, who were inspired by my drawings and animation. Beautiful and sacrificial, the two female bodies came to life through the animator’s movement in intimate and vulnerable moves within the beautiful space of light and motion created by the projection. They became the blooming spirit in the animation ritual that empower the myth and tragedy of those fictional female characters.
The way an animator can work closely with dancers frees the imagination of the animator to create life-like movement in a different dimension than traditional screen-based animation, as well as create new storytelling method; and this process generates ongoing questions and new perspectives of performance-based animation in a multi-media gallery space.
[1] Siegfried Zielinski,” Expanded Animation: A Short Genealogy in Words and Images,” in Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan (New York: Routledge, 2013).
[2] Art2, “Pain & Sympathy: William Kentridge”, 2010, accessed October 2024, https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/william-kentridge-pain-sympathy-short/.
[3] Out of The Inkwell: Invisible Ink (1921). Directed by Dave Fleischer. USA: Goldwyn Pictures. Uploaded to YouTube by 8thManDVDcom in 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMiBRGJ_24w.
[4] Liu Shuliang, “Chapter 1: Re-read ‘Life-offering’—The power dynamic between animator and animated character,” in A Study on Meta-animation (Sichuan Art Press, 2022), 25.
[5] Hong Huo, “H: Essence of Fire| Story of Red| Gesture of Flower” (MFA thesis exhibition, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2021).
[6] Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, first printed edition edited by Gao E and Cheng Wieyuan in 1791.
Hong Huo was born in Beijing and has since 2011been living and studying in the U.S. Huo received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Kinetic Imaging from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2017 and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. Huo’s interdisciplinary practice wanders between multi-media installation, experimental animation, and performance art and her works have been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally. Huo is currently an Assistant Professor teaching Graphic Design and Digital Media at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.