2023–2024 (ongoing)
Overview
Ancestral Imprints is a site-specific screendance film created during Katrina McPherson's week-long Dance in the Landscape intensive on Easdale Island in Argyll, Scotland. Born from years of genealogical research tracing fragmented family lineages across six countries, the work investigates the relationship between body, ancestry, and landscape when roots are disconnected or incomplete.
The film explores what it means to dance in a landscape where some ancestors lived, while other lineages—particularly traces of Creek and Chickasaw Native American heritage—remain absent or unknowable. Working within McPherson's four-hour filming constraint and without predetermined storyboarding, I let the island's unique slate quarries, ocean, and forest formations guide the work's emergence.
The two other dancers embody imagined ancestral spirits emerging from rock and forest—speculative presences representing the mystery of who came before. The film includes contact improvisation-style collaborative camera work, with all three dancers trading the camera person-to-person during filming. John O'Donohue's poetry and writing on belonging, land, and spirit became the work's structural and editorial centerpiece during post-production.
Research Questions
How might screendance function as speculative documentation when personal or ancestral histories are fragmented or inaccessible?
What does it mean to dance in landscapes of partial ancestral connection when genealogical research reveals both presence and profound absence?
How can screendance attend to landscape not as backdrop but as active collaborator, historical witness, and ancestral archive?
How might collaborative, improvisatory camera work explore witnessing, perspective, and kinesthetic empathy?
Methods & Approach
The work integrated genealogical research as pre-production inquiry with site-responsive movement improvisation, environmental listening practices, and somatic attunement to the island's slate quarries, ocean, and rock formations. The emergent choreographic process allowed landscape and bodies to co-create the work without predetermined storyboards. Contact improvisation principles informed collaborative camera work, with dancers trading the camera during filming. Post-production integrated John O'Donohue's texts on belonging, landscape, and spirit as structural and poetic framework.
Contribution
Ancestral Imprints contributes to screendance discourse by positioning landscape as active collaborator and embodiment as research methodology for investigating ancestry, belonging, and disconnection. By foregrounding speculative documentation—filming in a Scottish landscape connected to particular ancestral strands while acknowledging profound absences—the project offers a framework for artists engaging with diaspora, adoption, migration, disrupted lineages, or settler colonial inheritance.
The work demonstrates how screendance can hold space for both presence and absence, using collaborative camera work, duration, and the camera's witnessing capacity to explore what Sara Ahmed calls "orientation" toward land, lineage, and belonging. The process-based approach (no storyboard, limited time, improvisatory camera-passing) models how constraints and emergence generate embodied knowledge.
Critically, the work acknowledges what remains unresolved, including Arizona footage requiring reconsideration and the complexity of tracing working-class versus wealthy ancestral lines. The film positions itself as part of an ongoing research process rather than a finished statement, modeling how screendance can hold uncertainty and ethical questioning.
Collaborators
Performers: Freya Jeffries, Lewis Landini, Ri Lindegren
Mentor/Workshop Leader: Katrina McPherson
Site Facilitator: Colin McPherson
Performers: Freya Jeffries, Lewis Landini, Ri Lindegren
Mentor/Workshop Leader: Katrina McPherson
Site Facilitator: Colin McPherson
Screenings
Life in Motion, Tempe Center for the Arts, Tempe, AZ (2025)
Life in Motion, Tempe Center for the Arts, Tempe, AZ (2025)