Sharon Lockhart's Goshogaoka

Goshogaoka is a 20 minute film made by Sharon Lockhart that chronicles a day of a young girl's basketball team in a junior high school near Tokyo and their routine. The film was shot on 16mm. Throughout viewing the film, the audience falls into the hypnotic choreographed movements of the young girl and the drone of their voices as they harmoniously chant along with their exercises. Lockhart strives to link art and the human body through her film while taking a non-conventional approach to choreography in film.
In my film class, Concepts Production, we discussed Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time and non-dancing elements. Ritual is a 15 minute film made in 1946 on silent, black and white film. Main character Rita Christiani begins the film when she encounters Maya Deren herself and is startled when Deren disappears. This begins a dream-like sequence of where Christiani is transported to a dinner party and then onward to dance with dancer Frank Westbrook. Goshogaoka shares the non-dancing element factor. Both films have dance like gestures, with Goshogaoka's girls robotic back and forth movements, that are curiously graceful and Ritual's famous dinner party scene, where Christiani is interacting with others at a dinner party and one could swear that the guests were dancing as they gracefully sought out someone and then another and so forth.


In Deren's article, "Ritual in Transfigured Time", she states,

"...if one were to omit from an actual party all the long conversational pauses, there would be left mainly that constant moving pattern of smiling, social anxiety; each person seeking to reach someone at the other end of the room, or moving, tentatively, to meet someone new, or embracing an old friend, or edging away from someone dull towards someone interesting."

The same idea can be applied with Lockhart. If one were to take away the chanting of the girls and the actual basketball that is being used, there would only being the rhythmic movements of each individual who strives to fall in the same place the person before the was. Goshogaoka focuses on the art of the human body, and the way our body becomes (in a way) a machine whose main purpose is to carry out a task, smoothly and efficiently. Isn't this what dancing is, as well? To piece together an amount of movements that serve to tell a story, one bit at a time?

The difference between Deren and Lockhart and their films respectively is the individual aspect of each film. While Deren's film incorporates two dancers, the rest of her cast are not. Christiani and Westbrook have a dance sequence, true, but the rest of the time the characters movements are mimicking the fluidness of life itself. Although the same could be said about Lockhart, her team of girls work as one unit. Their bodies are part of one big machine (think the kid's television show, "Transformers" if you will). Ritual is about an individual's experience as she moves through a surreal world, while Goshogaoka is about a mutual experience amongst many individuals. Despite these differences, however, both Ritual In Transfigured Time and Goshogaoka use non-dancing elements explore the art behind human motions and interactions.