A Short Film in Which a Human Drummer Encounters a Drumming Cockatoo
This is the first in a series of “encounters” between musicians and animals, conceived by Zoë Sadokierski for the Animal Allegories project. The series explores what it might mean to play “with” another species and how we might curate an encounter with a threatened species in a way that minimizes interference with vulnerable habitat.
In this video, the drummer Laurence Pike improvises in response to field recordings of palm cockatoos. The recordings were captured by the biologist Christina Zdenek in the Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia. Clemens Habicht edited the recordings, then filmed Laurence’s performance in a 360-degree stereoscopic display studio in Sydney. Traces of many people, places, and technologies are entangled in this intimate encounter between man and bird. See film’s accessibility transcription below.
Read about the ideas behind this project in “Exercises in Minor Ornithology: Listening to What We Cannot Know“
Perhaps one aspect of taking seriously the lives of other animals is accepting that their creative expressions exist entirely outside our cultural frameworks, that their intentions remain fundamentally opaque to us. This opacity need not be a problem to be solved. What happens when we embrace radical incomprehension as a starting point, accepting that the bird’s drumming and vocalizations exist in a universe of meaning entirely separate from our own, and that its beauty lies precisely in that separation? How to resist the urge to explain the birds in human terms while also pointing to that entanglement, and to the disturbance that human activity has on the lives of other species, even in the unseen depths of a forest in far northern Queensland?…
Film’s accessibility description
Video footage of a large, dark-gray palm cockatoo with a red cheek patch in a tree, snapping a branch off with its strong beak. Title text in white reads: Animal Allegories presents A Curious Encounter. Laurence Pike & Palm Cockatoo.
The video cuts to the same footage of the palm cockatoo being played in a circular room, with a man seated at a full drum kit, playing.
The video continues to cut between close-up footage of palm cockatoos and the room where the drummer is playing, surrounded by the same footage of birds.
The bird is snapping off small branches and whittling the sticks, testing them as drumsticks against a tree. Sometimes, two birds are shown at a nest hollow in an old tree. The male is testing the drumsticks and building the nest inside the tree hollow by dropping sticks into it while the female watches him. Sometimes they turn their heads side to side, looking at each other and cocking their crest feathers.
The end titles read:
Performance and audio editing Laurence Pike
Cinematography and editing Clemens Habicht
With field footage by Christina Zdenek
Concept and production Zoë Sadokierski / Animal Allegories
With the support of the University of Technology Sydney’s Data Arena and an Australia Council for the Arts International Engagement Grant.
Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals
Curated by Zoë Sadokierski and Ceridwen Dovey of Animal Allegories.
Animal Allegories’ Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals project. The off-kilter stories that make up the Future Fables collection are intended to open up new thresholds for considering how humans relate to the more-than-human species around us. These stories emerged alongside another project Animal Allegories is developing with the Australian Museum, titled “Survival Stories: Threatened Species and the Scientists Who Study Them.” Visit the Animal Allegories page for more information about Future Fables.
Humans and Nature Press Digital is honored to present Future Fables as an ongoing digital story gallery highlighting a variety of text, audio, video, and artwork capturing the power of human and nature encounters and connections. Stay tuned for more fables to come.
Credits:
Featured image credit: by Zoë Sadokierski
“Curious Encounter: Palm Cockatoo x Laurence Pike” is an Animal Allegories production.
Concept and creative production: Zoë Sadokierski
Performance: Laurence Pike
Videography and editing: Clemens Habicht
Field footage supplied by Christina Zdenek
All field footage copyright @CNZdenek. Contact christinazdenek@gmail.com
Created with the support of an Australia Council for the Arts International Engagement Grant, Thomas Ricciardiello and the University of Technology Sydney Data Arena, and the UTS School of Design.
