"like a miracle" – The New York Times
navigating memory, trauma, and the creative mind
Based on an early-age incident, Secondary Dominance, a dance- and music-centric 82-minute film, kaleidoscopically explores trauma through the dual prisms of art and science. A neuroscientist invites an artist to speak at a medical conference on PTSD and the brain. During her talk, she reads a letter she wrote to her childhood sexual abuser, igniting a high-voltage ride through her psychological landscape, illuminating the nonlinearity of memory and our capacity, as humans, to transform through this complexity...
LOGLINE
A neuroscientist invites an artist to speak at a conference on PTSD, trauma, and the brain. During her talk, she reads a letter she wrote to her childhood sexual abuser, igniting a dance-and-music-centric journey into her psychological landscape, illustrating the nonlinearity of memory and transformation.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Based on an early age incident, Secondary Dominance, a dance- and music-centric autofictional
feature film, kaleidoscopically explores trauma through the dual prisms of art and science.
This film is deeply personal to me, rigorously honest, and was somewhat scary to create. It is an expression of how over the last 38 years, since an incident of sexual trauma as a 4-year-old,
I’ve navigated my relationship to myself and to others.
This is not a victim piece. It opens up big questions: questions about a mother’s response to an early age incident; a sincere inquiry about a perpetrator’s experience and their humanity, and a deep dive into the systemic complexities that lead up to and result from an occurrence of sexual trauma.
Secondary Dominance’s characters are “The Child”, “The Scientist turn Muse”, “The Lover turn Dragon”, “The Dragon turn Light”, “The Receiver”, and “The Self”.
“The Self” is played by me, and “The Scientist turn Muse” is played by my co-writer / co-director, Wade who — in parallel with my auto-fictional experience navigating my character — is currently in school obtaining a degree in neuroscience. "The Dragon" character is examined through the lens of Balkan mythology, alongside western childhood fairytales, acting as a framework for exploring our far more nuanced lived realities, ones wherein simplified archetypes do not exist.
Our overarching intention for this film is that it can be of service, that through an adventurous storytelling template, Secondary Dominance can act as a conduit for a multidimensional conversation around trauma, transformation, non-linearity of memory, and our capacity as humans to hold this complexity.
Sarah Small and Wade McCollum's creative confluence emerged in 2016 during HERE Arts Center’s PROTOTYPE Festival wherein they co-directed a staged work of Small’s once-was-stand-alone musical album, Secondary Dominance.
In other words, this film was crafted somewhat backwards, as the soundtrack came first and the script came last. Following the staged work, they directed a series of music videos of the material, after which they created an album-length music video. It was at this point that they realized they’d unearthed the opportunity to create a feature film, wherein a script and structure could scaffold the music and imagery to express more didactically, with the goal of making the themes explored accessible to a wider audience, and in turn be of service.
Coming from substantively different artistic backgrounds, Small from the Fine Arts and music and McCollum from Broadway and neuroscience, their creative disciplines overlap and range from writing, directing, and performing; to composing and singing; to editing and directing photography.
What brings Small & McCollum together is the mutual thrill they share uncovering symbolic and poetic potentialities in search of adventurous storytelling opportunities; the natural momentum generated while disassembling and reassembling elements — the way chemists do with molecules. They have fun imagining this as the Science of Curiosity and thus have branded their forthcoming directorial and producorial company Curiostronomy Pictures.
CREATORS