by
Dan Senn

see video
(5:20)

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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 stored my Sony Hi8 camera next to the window when I noticed, as given in the screenshot above, that the homeless 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 burst into my studio yelling, "Dad! There's a dead man in the car across the street!" Again, I swiveled the camera through the blinds and started taping.

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

The scraps of spoken text used in the sound track are taken from an unrelated project where an elderly man (Harold Speer) describes "gandydancers" at work on the railroad in the 1930s. This achieved a purposeful confusion linking this unfortunate man with railroad gandy dancers of the Depression and the animated, dancing detectives.

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

Contact Dan for a hi rez version of the video.