This piece is to remind you of resilience, or toughness. Life is not a straight path and there come moments when the best you can do is endure. This requires bring out the fighter within you. It may also require you to stay focused.
Look out for the following objects in the video, which carry the symbolism as described below:
Light sources (light bulbs, lanterns, etc.): ideas that could help you get through the difficult times
Switched off TV screen with headphones over it: the feeling of emptiness
Guns, glasses and the helmet: self-defense mechanisms
Male and Female characters: your body (male character) and your soul (female character)
The video shows two dancers, a man and a woman. The woman exists in the imagination of the man. Perhaps it is someone he knew, loved, cared for... Ballet-style gentle dance of the woman is contrasted with a free-style rough dance of the man. This symbolizes the unattainability of the imagination. Half-way in the video the man is shown collapsed on the floor. This scene is intended to reveal that the man has actually been suffering from the unattainability of his imagination. He longs for the woman, who remains to be only a fragment of his imagination throughout the video. Towards the end of the video, the woman dances to a light and playful music. The video ends with the man walking away from the camera. He momentarily stops, looks back, and then confidently makes a few more steps in the direction he was heading, away from the camera, till the video concludes. The man has resolved the problem: the joy of her existence, even if only in his imagination, must overcome the suffering.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word "monotony" as "tedious sameness". For a creative soul, monotony is on par with torture. This piece conveys the struggles of the soul that has been trapped in monotony and is looking for ways to break free from it. The video shows a man performing various free style dance moves as an expression of the struggles. Behind him is a wall on which, in the first part of the video, projects a movie of clouds moving through the sky. This is a symbolism of one's creative aspirations before one becomes a prisoner of monotony. In the second part of the video, the projection changes to showing the dancer in action, from multiple angles. This symbolizes that after a while of monotony, the aspirations dissolve into excessive awareness of one's own self. At this stage, an illusion of having broken free from monotony may arise, which is symbolized by the scene with the chair. The chair is the illusion of freedom, illustrated by the dancer performing various dance moves over and around the chair. During the scene with the chair, the music is cheerful. This scene transitions into a scene leading to the finale, where the chair is gone and the mood of the music drops low signifying the sad realization that the feeling of having broken free from monotony was only an illusion. Right at the very end, the scene shows the dancer up close. A moment after the music has stopped, the dancer abruptly turns his head around as part of what seems to be another dance move, which ends the video. It leaves the viewer uncertain whether monotony has been overcome or not; the intention here is to urge the viewer to contemplate on their own monotony and ask the question whether it has been overcome or not?
A woman in her early 20's improvising some dance moves in front of a camera with the balloons in the background and informal outfit signifying celebration of freedom of expression.
Alina is a TikToker, with more than 90K subscribers. I am grateful to her for creating the video clips in this music video, which was later matched with Opus 99, an improvisation of mine from 2015. The rhythmic structure of Opus 99 shifts away from the "classical" style common to my work.