About

Title: T'Apped

Director, Choreographer, Film: Bala Sarasvati

Performers: Compañía Nacional de Danza Costa Rica

Sylvia Montero, Artistic Director

Format: Digital Film (film size in full output is approx. 7 gigs)

Length: 23 minutes

 

The film created by: Bala Sarasvati, Jane Willson Professor in the Arts

in collaboration with Compañía Nacional de Danza Costa Rica

Sylvia Montero, Artistic Director and assisted by Mario Vircha (company member).

Brief Description:

The film is a green screen project that evolved out of green screen film capturing and the

accompanying editing experiments that I have conducted over the past year.

T'Apped explores the intersection of technology, social media and personal spirituality and

realization. How far have we gone to define ourselves and each other through use of

technological devices? Have we lost "touch"? In the film, I combined natural environments,

digitally generated clips, special effects and the performers (filmed with green screen) depict

scenes through acting, contemporary dance and aerial dance. The message of the film is not

only expressed through multimedia visual images, but inspired by the words of spiritual

teachers Ram Dass and Lorraine Weiss and music of East Forest and Kayne West. The veteran

performers depict a range of emotions and enact a multitude of ways that we use technology

to fulfill our obsessions, desires and dreams. Because the lyrics in the selected music/sound

backdrop became very important to the overall message, I have embedded Spanish subtitles.

Potential Audience: dance, film and theatre students, dance appreciation students, Hispanic

population (since Central American actor/dancers), general population - wide range of ages.

Special recognition: Immediately after filming the Compañía Nacional de Danza in Costa Rica,

company member Wendy Chinchilla attended Cannes Film Festival in France as a major actor in

the Costa Rican produced film Clara Sola. The film received overwhelming awards and

accolades and internationally recognized around the world. Numerous countries (including US

and many in Europe) have since bought the film rights.

I have included a few screenshots from the film T’Apped below