As a viewer, watching Ann Oren’s Piaffe is akin to wandering through an exhibition at a gallery. In both instances audiences are greeted with beautiful images, laden with sumptuous detail, strung together in careful succession. Exhibitions are bound by an internal logic that unfolds in ways unique to each observer, as does Piaffe. Oren wields an array of esoteric ideas to understand body fluidity, she reckons with sexual identity by asking all the wrong questions, somehow still landing on the right feeling.
In Piaffe, Eva (Simone Bucio) is a foley artist who must finish an advertisement for “Equili” — a fictional medication designed to give low-energy consumers a vaguely described “boost”, after her sibling, Zara (Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau,) is unable to continue with the project. After doing a poor initial job, she is instructed to go and experience the natural sounds of life and come back with a more accurate sound. Eva initially does her job with a detached interest, but gradually she becomes obsessed, possessed by the way sound feels, the way a wave of noise rolls across her body, cracking her joints, stretching her limbs. This project infects Eva, until she eventually grows a horse’s tail.
Witnessing the physical loosening of Eva is similar to the unfurling of ferns observed in the film itself, humming with life as they extend outwards waiting to see the sun, to soak it up; tendrils of life collapsing into one another. The film’s call to hear life is also a call to place herself within the intertwined network of sound. How does she want to sound? What does she want to hear?
Within the film, the act of walking is treated as an accomplice in the covert attempt to enact a personal soundscape. Eva’s unsteady bare feet pad across her flat, later they skip alongside a canal, the snap of her shoe drawing the eye of passers-by. In her encounters with the botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) there is a shared animalistic intuition captured in the way they walk in tandem. Eventually, the rhythm of their foreplay is reflected in the rise and fall of her heels. Desire is laid bare in the walk of these characters; it is only when she has surrendered to this sound that she delivers stunningly accurate sound for the Equili ad.
The horse’s tail that stretches out from Eva (until it is almost comically long) is not just a marker of the way she is markedly different, it forces her to reimagine her interactions with other people. In an interview with James Prestridge for Close-Up Culture, Oren describes her preoccupation with the “submission theatre” of horse and rider. Eva steps into this performance, toying with her proximity to nature, remaining static under the curious, prying gaze of a scientist. Towards the end of the film, she spins around the botanist, captured in the ever-shifting glow of bare bulbs, moving in leaps and kicks. His repeated attempts to grab her and kiss her is a cruel misreading of her new form.
The film is composed by a string of stunning 16 mm shots, but there is also striking meaning buried in the narrative of Piaffe. Eva’s arc charts the need for recognition, the desire to achieve clarity by being seen from another’s perspective. Oren holds our most complicated wants up to the light, she encourages us to stare in, anonymous eyes witnessing the dance between human and non-human. In the final act of the film, Eva meets a worthy dance partner in Zara. Grunts, huffs, and convulsions ricochet between the two, distinct to each of them while also a mimicry of the other. Finally, surrounded by the steady beat that rattles the club, Eva is able to reveal herself, secure in her nonconformity. Once she is confident in this mode of communication, the noise outside of her control no longer threatens her, she lets it inform rather than determine her directions.
Ann Oren redesigns the body to suit new ways of communicating in Piaffe while Simone Bucio, in the lead role, translates this newly rendered language through fraught physical contortions. Together they manage to soothe and challenge the viewer all at once. Piaffe is a tangy visual feast, helmed by a creator who imbues the act of making sound with a sense of urgency and strangeness.
