Please select:
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
– Friedrich Nietsche
“Ya gotta just like, i don’t know, Boogie-Woogie.”
– Quinn Martin
Logline: A sports drama centered around one of America’s most prestigious contemporary dance companies, focusing on the dancers within as they compete against both each other and themselves.
Motion, a half-hour drama designed for the digital age, hurls one into the crucible of a once legendary Chicago dance company, where the stage is as ferocious as it is hallowed. At the center of this stadium-meets-church stands Sena and Quinn. Fundamental opposites, their fractured bond separates them while their environment thrusts them back together, forcing them into a competition not just for the crown of the company but for the reconciliation of their own identities.
The sport is dance and the Game is transcendence. Key performances erupt as surreal, Spike Jonze-esque music videos, visual spectacle designed to reveal the hidden innermost self as well as the silent language of victory or defeat. Surrounding our two hands lies an ensemble of equally ambitious challengers, athletes as much as artists, politicians as much priests; each competitor navigates their own complex desires and confronts the meanings found within the wake of their collisions – when royal rigidity is forced to move with divine fluidity in a pas de deux, who gives ground? Who swallows who? What meanings lie within their aftermath?
Emotionally the quiet explorations of Mad Men by way of the intense pursuits of Whiplash, structurally the evolving framework of The Wire by way of timeless mythology, Motion uses the architecture of competition and a grounded psychological examination of its players to explore the relentless pursuit of self-realization, the fear of love, and the eternal ebbing and flowing that occurs between the world found inside oneself and the world found without.
However, this section is nothing more than a satellite image, a broad picture of a forest taken from a thousand miles up. So, trying to find the devil in the details, let us come down to the surface and recognize that this forest is not just a simple chorus of trees and leaves but rather a vibrant and thrumming ecosystem, one that is home to a vast array of living and breathing…
“We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.”
– Martha Graham
“Boogie-Woogie.”
– Sena Paek
Logline: The lives of contemporary dancers, the pursuit of things just out of reach.
When I was young I learned that our understanding of color is not universal and that there is no real way to confirm if my blue is the same as your blue. For all I know my blue could be your green and your red my purple and so on and so forth. What essentially prevents us from being able to solve this conundrum once and for all lies in our methods of corroborating our inner lives. It turns out the only way I can begin to define what my blue is through acts of comparison, so if I were to say “look at that sky, it’s blue, right?” you would then say, “what are you, stupid?” And you would be right because of course it is blue, that’s what we were taught to call the sky. While the fundamental disconnect at play is worthy of its own philosophical branch of exploration, what is just as interesting, however, is that the act of juxtaposition itself also carries its own existential weight. It implies that even as we live in the world, the act of comparison from our internal selves to the external world is the only way we can corroborate our very beings. We exist not as individuals anchored only to ourselves but as a single point in relation to a separate one. In this way, at least as it pertains to the Human modality of understanding, we are the authors of a fundamental binary, a tool used to confirm and navigate nothing less than existence itself. Manifesting itself not just as Me on one side and You on another but also trickling down into the cement that forms some of the most fundamental cornerstones of our understanding, providing structure to some of our most base concepts like life and death, light and dark, even existence and non-existence. One simply cannot define “empty” without also implicitly defining “full.”
At this point you might be thinking, “hey, ain’t this all a bit much for what’s s’posed to be some kind of tv progrum?” And that is a fair point but allow me to offer a counterpoint: not only is it this binary, this fundamental duality, that lies at the core of this particular half-hour television progrum but you chose this particular view so that’s kind of on you.
However, while I have absolutely demolished you in this game of wits by answering a question that I really just asked to myself, I still must admit that my claims of duality, as they currently stand, are still only just claims. Concepts without form. Wind without air. No matter how thoughtful an idea might be, on its own an idea is a nebulous and ultimately useless thing. So here enters our first iteration of structure, taking shape as our dual protagonists, Sena and Quinn. And while these two hands are meant to embody nothing less than Yin and Yang respectively, it is through their life, the multi-faceted nature of their humanity, that Motion will be able to cast light and explore the duality found on other levels, be it head and heart, comedy and drama or even the simple fun ones like rock and roll, peanut butter and jelly, or the sense of isolation felt within Eastern collectivism and the almost aching restlessness present in Western individualism.
Employed as professional dancers by a once-prestigious contemporary repertory company, Sena and Quinn are not only inhabitants of Chicago but denizens of the larger world of dance, a space that exists outside of any map but can only be found somewhere between the Stadium and the Church of the human subconscious. And as it is that form follows function, so too shall this abstract location of dance within the human psyche be what informs the shape of our series. From the Stadium will come the DNA of a sports story and from the Church shall come a carefully defined system of surreality that, when executed, will be visually akin to that of a music video (this particular aspect will be more categorically defined in Energy.)
As it has been illustrated by the greatest sports stories of not just our time but all time, from Whiplash to the myth of Atalanta, so too will Motion keep its lens fundamentally focused on the pursuit over the structure of dance as a sport. It is not by its descriptions of the rules or the minutiae of the competition that allows The Tortoise and the Hare to transcend from simple story to timeless fable, but rather its portrayal of the psychological nature of its competitors. By understanding who the competitors are we are able to understand how it was one beat the other. Allowing us to then arrive at the larger thematic insights around the nature and value of perseverance. In this series, expect no lengthy discussions of technical minutiae or arcs spent learning some kind of move or technique, rather the ultimate key for success or failure will lie almost solely within the feelings of each character as they face not only the challenges of a given episode, but the broader, singular competitions that will come to unite all of the relevant competitors of a given season. In line with the resulting victories and losses that will come to each of these characters, we will come to discover that what they individually embody are not just feelings, but philosophies.
Furthermore, while grounded character focus and the narrative vehicle of competition will remain as fundamental constants across our series, it does not mean that they are aspects immune from evolution. Using some of the devices that allowed The Wire to transcend from mere police drama into a grand statement on the American experiment, Motion will not only introduce a new perspective of the broader dance world with each successive season but also a larger, thematically related competition. It will be through this successive growth that will allow Motion to expand the scope of its thesis and, by its end, total into something greater than the sum of its parts.
The meanings and arguments found within this series are intended to be numerous (after all, isn’t one of the greatest strengths of episodic storytelling its latitude?) but when whittled down to its most bare essence, Motion is nothing more or less than a story of love. While we will examine the forms love can take (i.e., Eros, Storge, Mania, etc.) as well as the objects we so desperately throw these sentiments upon (i.e., beauty, truth, happiness, etc.), it will be through the very exploration of love’s seemingly natural and irrepressible nature that Motion will unify the fundamental Human binary into something entire and singular.
Now while prolonged discussions of conceptual framework are fun and all, a diet of ideas is still just starvation so, and with no small degree of personal relief, I say we move on to something with a little more protein in…