Brain Pickings

Pretty Big Dig: Construction Cranes as Ballet Dancers

Mechanical grace, or how to never look at a construction hat the same way again.

When Canadian choreographer and filmmaker Anne Troake was passing by a construction site one day, she observed the incredible orchestration with which the enormous machines moved, a special kind of mechanical choreography. So she wondered what it would be like to actually choreograph these giant dancers into a graceful ballet. The result was Pretty Big Dig — a poetic 2002 short film that articulates the assimilation of machines in the visual language of dance, with Troake’s characteristic undertone of humor and irreverence. This ABC clip about the project is the last remnant of the film online — a hint at the tragedy of how much creativity gets lost in analog archives and buried in closed-access libraries — but what it lakes in completeness it makes up for in sheer charm and inspiration, a beautiful manifestation of the incredible creativity that thrives at the intersection of wildly different disciplines.

More of and about Pretty Big Dig can be found on FREEDOM — a fascinating documentary about Troake’s work and unorthodox, cross-disciplinary approach to dance, alongside more of the world’s most eccentric, extraordinary dancers, choreographers and urban performers.

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