Véronique MacKenzie

A multimedia performance with visual artist and animator Susan Tooke, audio/visual composer Lukas Pearse, and dance artist Veronique MacKenzie, Depths of Sorrow is a large-scale projection show, which pulls us into the haunting and tragic story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic with layers of animation and historical images. Combined with live dance performance and captured by infrared camera, they are woven into ghostly images using real-time video processing. This abstract narrative retells a story of courage and the ensuing darkness that overtook them on that fateful night. The immersive sound score draws into the emotion of the event and underwater imagery pulls us down to the final resting place and into the Depths of Sorrow.

Depths of Sorrow emerged from a previous collaboration of Tooke, Mackenzie and Pearse on their project Motion Activated, which appeared in part during the Nocturne 2011 event. Its ghostly infrared capture of a dancer interlaced with animations lent itself well to the thoughts that it would be appropriate to create a piece for the Titanic 100 commemoration event.

This piece is an abstract narrative about a fictional passenger as she embarks on her journey across the ocean on a vessel deemed unsinkable. Set amongst hand-drawn images and animations based on archival photographs of the ship’s interior and exterior, we see the character’s video image moving and dancing as she experiences the initial hopes of her exciting journey through to her final horrifying moments in a chilling underwater video section. The character is often accompanied by a ghostly infrared figure which suggests that she is still unaware of her final journey.

Depths of Sorrow has an emotional and engaging sound score which includes nostalgic musical elements of the era as well as a Morse Code Fugue as the story arc reaches it’s final conclusion.