.Gandydancer
(1992, 2001)
by
Dan Senn
see video
(5:20)

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sound.

Gandydancer is a chance videotaping of the last hours of a vagrant's life. Living in a downtown loft in Tacoma, Washington in 1992, I had mounted a Hi8 camera next to the window when I noticed that the man who had been sleeping in the car across the street was being questioned by the police. Then, for some unknown reason, I swiveled the camera through the blinds and started recording. The following morning, perhaps 10 hours later, my young son came bursting into my studio yelling, "Dad! There's a dead man in the car across the street!" Once again, I swiveled the camera through the blinds and started taping.

Years later, nine years later I founx this footage and could not imagine a way of using it without it being gruesome. With only a small amount of crudely shot footage, I  decided to re-animate the filmed characters, to create cartoonish stick-like figures who were participating in a wretched police affair.

The spoken text used as part of the sound track is taken from an unrelated project where an elderly man describes "gandydancers" at work on the railroad in the 1930s. This achieved a confusion linking this unfortunate man with railroad gandydancers of the depression and the animated dancing detectives.

The spund track is performed by Dan Senn on a bass violin with all of its strings tuned to E-natural and using a cyclical bowing technique at Shy Anne Studio in Tacoma.

Contact Dan for a hi rez version of the video.

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