M O T I O N

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 as they compete not just for the crown to the company but for the reconciliation of their own identities.

The sport is dance and its 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 divine fluidity is forced to lead royal rigidity in a pas de deux, who gives ground? Who swallows who? What remains in the aftermath?

Emotionally the quiet explorations of Mad Men by way of the intense pursuit of Whiplash, structurally the evolving seasonal framework of The Wire by way of the myth of Atalanta, Motion uses the framework of competition and a grounded psychological examination of its players to explore the relentless pursuit of self-realization, the prism of love and all its million faces, and the eternal ebbing and flowing that occurs between the world found inside of 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. Now, trying to find the devil in the details, let us come down to the surface and find that Motion’s forest is not just a simple chorus of trees and leaves but rather a vibrant and thrumming ecosystem home to a vast array of living and breathing…

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 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 is the only way we can corroborate our very own existence, whether that be our internal selves or our external ones. 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 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 structural cornerstones of our understanding, life and death, light and dark, even such base ideas as existence and non-existence. One simply cannot define “empty” without also 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 of my own: not only is it this binary, this fundamental duality, that lies at the core of this particular half-hour television progrum but I can actually also name this page whatever I want and since I’ve named it “Abstract” this entire thought is exactly where it’s s’posed to be. So. Fuckin’ checkmate there I guess, huh.

However, while I’ve demolished you in this game of wits by answering a question that I really just asked to myself, I still must admit what while I have justified the placement I still have yet to justify its purpose. An idea, no matter how thoughtful, is still just an idea, formless, nebulous and on its own, basically useless. So enter our dual protagonists, the vessels of story who through their very lives will provide shape to this duality, Sena and Quinn. While they are the two hands meant to embody nothing less than Yin and Yang respectively, it is through their life, the multi-faceted nature of their humanity, and their eternal Motions of coming together and pulling apart that we will also be able to cast light and explore the duality found at other levels, be it head and heart, comedy and drama or even the simple, fun ones like rock and roll, peanut butter and jelly, the sense of isolation felt within Eastern collectivism and the almost aching restlessness present in Western individualism, etc.

While physically, Sena and Quinn are professional dancers employed by a Chicago-based contemporary rep company, beyond that they are denizens of the larger world of dance. A space that exists outside of any map but can still be found somewhere between a stadium and a church. And as 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 the system of a music video (this aspect will be closely defined in the section titled “Space”).

From Whiplash to the myth of Atalanta, as it has been illustrated by the greatest sports stories of not just our time but all time, so too will MOTION take a page from their books and keep its lens focused on the pursuit more than the structure of the sport. The Tortoise and the Hare transcends from story to fable not by descriptions on the rules or the minutiae of the race but instead by its portrayal on the psychological nature of its competitors. And then by understanding how it was that the Tortoise was able to beat the Hare are we then able to derive a larger insight about our own nature. In this series, expect no lengthy discussions of technical minutiae or arcs spent learning some kind of move or technique. In Motion the ultimate key for success or failure will lie almost solely within the feelings of each character as they face a given challenge. And so, as we introduce these individual characters and their feelings throughout the course of our first season, we will then come to unite them within the crucible of a larger, singular competition. Discovering that the feelings they individually embody are not just philosophies specific to dance but for life itself.

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. Each successive season of Motion will not only introduce a new perspective but also a thematically related competition, each descending from their own truths found natively within the broader dance world. It will be through our characters navigating these new perspectives and competitions that we will then also be able to trace our fingers around the outline of something much larger than what we initially thought. In this way, Motion is a disciple of the Wire, hoping to total into something greater than the sum of its own parts using some of the devices that allowed The Wire to escape the confines of simple police drama and transform into a grand, singular statement on the American experiment.

The meanings and arguments found within this show 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 the concept of pursuit, and therefore MOTION, is nothing more or less than a story of love. Ultimately, this is an exploration of people and not only the forms that their love can take (i.e., Eros, Storge, Mania, fear, etc.) but also the juxtaposition of that love in relation to the object of its desire. And while it will be the portrayal of that relationship which will yield discoveries of innate Human meaning, it will be through the examination of the connection’s very existence which we shall also aim to illustrate the fact that, while there are always two sides, there is only ever one perfectly balanced coin.

Now while prolonged discussions of the abstract are fun and all, a diet of only 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…