Voices - Kym McDaniel
===

[00:00:00] 

Kym McDaniel: I know that my films, when they screen in a theater, I know when they're working is when the theater gets very quiet and it almost feels like people are afraid to like accidentally drop something on the floor, and that's when I know that the film has done something. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: Joining me today in the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio is Kym McDaniel, Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She is an [00:01:00] experimental filmmaker, writer, photographer, interdisciplinary artist, videographer, editor, choreographer, curator, and educator.

Have I left anything out? Professor McDaniel, welcome to Voices. 

Kym McDaniel: Thank you. Thank you so much. 

David Staley: Well, you know, I usually wait to ask this question later on in the interview, but I am particularly interested to know how you ended up as a filmmaker. I mean, of all the things in the world you could be doing, how did you end up as a filmmaker, especially one in the Department of Dance?

Kym McDaniel: So I actually, the story is a little not linear because I hated movies growing up. I, I was a very active child. I was a dancer, I did cheerleading, I did swimming, I did running, you know, I think I associated the movie theater with just like sitting in the dark and not, you know, having to focus for a long time and not being able to move.

So, I never had an affinity for filmmaking, I never wanted to do it at all, and it [00:02:00] wasn't until I was in undergrad for dance and then I had a head injury in my early twenties, and because of that injury, I wasn't able to dance or choreograph, but I still had a, like a year left of undergrad, and I was getting my BFA in Contemporary Performance and Choreography. I had taken a, it was a movement and film class that was co-taught between the film department and the dance department, and I really enjoyed that class and I felt as though the film professor in that class, really was inspiring to me and I felt very kind of close to her. And gratefully, my department at the time worked out this solution where in order to fulfill the remaining dance credits of the degree, I could be taking film classes as long as I was making dance films. So, due to like the grace and like the compassion of the faculty there, it allowed me to complete my degree while being [00:03:00] disabled, and then it kind of opened the door for me into filmmaking. 

David Staley: Was the injury caused while you were dancing? 

Kym McDaniel: It was, yeah. 

David Staley: Can you say a little more about that? 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah. You know, I think as a early 20-year-old, I often talk about the injury as the last physical injury in a string of physical injuries that actually started when I was a child.

So, I had chronic pain as a child, and then when I really started training professionally for dance, the injuries became more acute. So, you know, I blew up my knee, I had Achilles tendonitis, I broke my foot, you know, I had back issues, you know, it was kind of like ongoing kind of physical problems.

And, and now I know too is because I have a connective tissue disorder that makes me prone to getting injured, but at the time I just was kind of consistently [00:04:00] being injured, and so I kind of see the head injury, kind of the last kind of injury in a string of injuries, where it had been coming for a while and, because I think of illness and pain and holistically in the body, I also, I talk about the head injury as though it's an isolated event, but I think spiritually and psychologically there were things that led me to that moment where I collapsed and, you know, had some really intense symptoms for, for years that stemmed from this injury. 

David Staley: And my understanding is you also, and I didn't say this as part of your introduction, you've also developed an interest in what's known as disability studies as a result.

Kym McDaniel: Definitely. Yeah. 

David Staley: Could you give us a definition? What do we mean by, by disability studies? 

Kym McDaniel: Oh, it's a field that's relatively new. It started in the nineties, more formalized I guess in the nineties, but really like the Disability Rights Movement, disability [00:05:00] justice started throughout the seventies into the eighties trying to get the ADA passed.

So the... 

David Staley: The Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Kym McDaniel: Right, yeah. And so, as an academic field, I say it's new, you know, because there hasn't been a lot of departments that, you know, have it as a degree still even. But it's, I think COVID radicalized a lot of people or maybe woke them up more, and, and it definitely did that for me because all of a sudden everybody was inside and everybody was saying, you know, there was more of a focus on people who were immunocompromised and people who were worried about getting sick or people who were getting long COVID, and I started realizing like, I've been having these concerns for like years, you know, and, and now everybody else is kind of saying, mirroring things that I've experienced for years, and I think that was kind of the push in 2020 for me to go on and get this Advanced Certificate in Disability Studies from the City University of New York, because I really wanted [00:06:00] theory to support my embodied experience, and that's what the certificate did for me.

David Staley: Is your filmmaking your contribution to disability studies or have you made other contributions? 

Kym McDaniel: I would say yes to the filmmaking, although now, in my mind there's disability studies and which is kind of a historical framework for how disability has been implemented and understood in society and culturally, and there's also another kind of field called crip theory, and I feel like I'm actually, my work falls more into this crip theory. 

David Staley: Tell us more about what crip theory is and how's this distinct from, say, disability studies? 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah, I would say it's more intersectional than disability studies is. Disability studies, and I think they're continuing to try to make strides in the field, but has traditionally been very white, you know, and has very focused more so [00:07:00] on kind of the physical disabilities.

And so, a big thing in disability studies is thinking about the social model of disability versus the medical model. The medical model believes that if you're sick, it's your fault. You know if you're disabled, it's, and you use a wheelchair and you can't get into the building, well, you should figure out a way to get into the building somehow anyways.

And the social model disability believes that no, every building should have ramps, you know, that it's not the person with the disability who's the problem; it's actually society and culture is the thing that needs to shift. And that is a hundred percent true, but for me, as somebody who has struggled with chronic pain and chronic illness and some mental health difference, like having a ramp into the building doesn't really do anything for me if I'm struggling with depression, you know, like, so I think crip theory is more all encompassing of all the different types of disabilities that move beyond the physical, and is kind of interested in [00:08:00] complicating disability studies as a field and kind of all of the problems and issues that that brings up. And I think too, there's this relationship with queer theory in crip studies because like queer theory where the field reclaimed with the word queer, it's this similar with crip theory where they're using a word that was typically derogatory towards people with disabilities and then reclaiming that, and saying that it's crip theory as a field of study. 

David Staley: Hmm. Let's talk about some of your films, maybe your most recent one:_ Document with No End_. Tell us about this film, and I understand this is an audio medium, and so I'm asking you to describe a very visual piece of work. 

Kym McDaniel: Well, yeah, I used to teach a class called "Sound and Image", so I, I actually feel like, yeah, the film is, yeah, it's 50% visual, 50% audio. But yeah, this was a film that I, so in 2019, I had gotten a job teaching at Binghamton [00:09:00] University out in Central New York, and then I was teaching in a cinema department there, and then in 2022, I was offered a position teaching screen dance at the University of Utah, which is in Salt Lake City.

And that position I was, so I was teaching filmmaking in a dance department, which is similar to what I'm doing here. So, I moved out to Salt Lake in 2022 and that's where this film kind of began, because I signed the contract to move to Salt Lake, and then four days later, the article in the New York Times comes out that says, you know, Salt Lake City is on the verge of an environmental nuclear bomb, and... 

David Staley: Around water. 

Kym McDaniel: Around the, yeah, around water.

The Great Salt Lake drying up, which is about 45 minutes from Salt Lake City itself. And you know, I remember calling my mentor at the time and her asking me, can you take back your contract? You know, and I was like, I signed it. I was like, I don't think so. So, I moved out there knowing that [00:10:00] there was an environmental crisis going on, but I think again, it's something, where I think what I experienced when I moved out there is that this has been going on for decades out there, and a lot of people have become desensitized to it. They're like, oh yeah, they've been talking about that for years, that the lake is drying up. And as somebody new to the city, I was like, yeah, but there's arsenic in the air, like there's science that is showing that this lake is drying up at a rapid pace and that there's poison being released in the air, and there's no way that the wind isn't carrying that to the city. And so it was on my mind, you know, as soon as I moved out there, I started realizing I had this growing paranoia of going outside, even like opening my windows, you know? And because Salt Lake is in a valley, the air quality there beyond the Salt Lake drying up can get really bad because the air gets trapped in the valley and on and on. And [00:11:00] so, I was having this anxiety about the air and kind of making this connection to the invisibility of poison and the invisibility of illness. And then I got really sick. My thyroid tweaked out, there was kind of a sequence of events where I got thyroid disease and it wasn't getting any better and my cat also got thyroid disease and I was like, you know, I make it this joke, my cat's my daughter, but it, you know, it really, I, it was bizarre that it happened at the same time.

And so, the film is kind of about contending with this. It's like contending with the history of illness in my own life, but also in the state because the state of Utah has this history of lying to its citizens. I don't think that it's specific to Utah, but it's just very obvious, you know, there's a lot of research that's public about how the government [00:12:00] tested bombs in downstate Utah and in Nevada, and how the wind blew the nuclear dust, you know, and everybody was sick and then the government was lying about it. And so, again, like it was a moment for me where I was like, how much are they lying to us already?

And in a, especially in a state where you can't trust what they're saying to you. And so, I was trying to kind of connect this historical illness in the state with my own current kind of present day status. 

David Staley: When we watch the film, what are we going to see? 

Kym McDaniel: So, the film actually starts off with a fictional narrative.

There's text on screen where I wanted to try something new in my practice, and so this film is kind of an attempt at that on a few different levels. I think before this film, my practice is really personal, but I've been questioning over the last couple of years the relevance of [00:13:00] making films in a world that is increasingly more chaotic and needs intervention. And so, I think that for me, starting off this film with this like fictional narrative of these two women in bed together and they're kind of talking about how one woman was able to evacuate Earth because she kind of had the privileges to evacuate, she had the money and the resources to, and then this other woman wasn't able to evacuate, and there's kind of this conflict that happens with them in this fictional part of the film about what it means to have the resources to evacuate a situation, whether it's... 

David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

Kym McDaniel: Like geographically or emotionally, and kind of the aftermath of that. And really it's about, we kind of return to these two women on and off throughout the film, and for me it was more about trying to figure out how do you have a conversation where you cannot see the other point of [00:14:00] view, but you remain in relationship. And to me, that is a feminist negotiation and that's ultimately what I was interested in. It's like a moment in our country and our lives where we cannot be working through conflict often, and what does it mean to stay in conflict and move forward? 

David Staley: You said you wanted to try something new. 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah. 

David Staley: Why? Where did that impulse come from? 

Kym McDaniel: I think I get bored. I think, I think I have a fear. I worked on a series of films in graduate school and beyond that were called _Exit Strategies,_ and with those films, I had this fear that

I think when I was done with them, that every film that I made after that could be considered an exit strategy. So, there's like six exit strategies and then the film that I made after that, I was like, this film needs to be different because I don't want people to watch this film and think, why is this titled something else, it could just be part of her exit strategy series. [00:15:00] And so, I think every film that I make, I want it to stand on its own, like I want it to have its own identity, and I think that I hold myself to a certain pressure to try to be challenging myself, to be taking risks, so that it feels vulnerable.

It's like a constant kind of experiment with, like, what feels vulnerable in that moment. 

David Staley: Now, obviously you're a filmmaker, so I preface my question by saying that. You were talking about, in _Document __with__ No End_, talking about, well, some, some really important, significant issues.

Why film? WHY not write a thought piece or something like that? Why does the expression have to be on film? 

Kym McDaniel: It's is such a good question, and I feel like it's a question that I actually ask my students in the dance film class that I teach here at OSU, because most of the students in that class are dancers, and so I, I ask them like, why does this need to be on film? Like, why can't it be a stage dance? 

David Staley: Right. 

Kym McDaniel: So, two things. I think 'cause I'm [00:16:00] also trying to write a chapter right now for a volume on dance and disability, and it is so hard for me to get started writing this chapter, and I, I'm just like, in this moment of like, this is why I am a filmmaker, because it's like so much easier actually for me to get started making creative work than it is for me to be writing scholarly things. So, maybe it's just like, what feels exciting, you know, is like images feel exciting and the creativity of inventing a narrative feels exciting. And I just like, I think there's also, I know that my films, when they screen in a theater, I know when they're like "working", and it's like a very ambiguous thing to say that, but I know when they're working is when the theater gets very quiet and it almost feels like people are afraid to like accidentally drop something on the floor, and that's when I know that the film has done something. And I think that [00:17:00] there's something in that for me about wanting or inviting people to quiet down and listen, and I think there's a lot of personal ties for that, you know, for me, but I also think that maybe it's something I desire more in our culture and in the classroom, you know that we could be listening to each other more intimately. 

David Staley: With writing, there's not an audience. 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah. 

David Staley: To awe or to necessarily react to what you're writing. 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah. It's a community experience to be in a theater of people and I really, I've really become radicalized from somebody who hated movies, like to, to craving actually being in a theater.

David Staley: So it would seem. 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah. And I have to explain that to my dance students too, 'cause I think dancers, they understand performance, they understand the audience, like you have to have an audience, you know, it changes the performance when you have an audience, but it's the same exact thing for film. It's when you have people in the [00:18:00] theater watching the film, it's different than just watching it on your phone.

And it's something that you have to kind of convince dancers to believe in, that the film screening is a performance. 

David Staley: Mm. I'd like to talk about another film, or a series of films, I guess: _Room Studies_. 

Kym McDaniel: Yeah, I started the inspiration behind those when I was in Portugal in May, and so I had a residency in Lisbon and, well first, I was late to the residency because I had gotten really sick, and then when I got there I had a flare up.

So, I have a chronic pain kind of condition and it flares up depending on stress and a lot of other factors, and so I, I got there, and I've never been to Portugal before, I was so excited to be there, and I was just in so much pain, like blinding pain for the first, like I would say, 10 days I was there.

I just, it was this real internal struggle [00:19:00] for me, 'cause I was like, I wanna get out, I wanna take walks, I wanna experience, you know, everything that's here, and at the same time I was in bed, like having to just watch the sun move across the floor, you know, from the window in the room. And it made me realize that how many times do I spend in rooms like waiting for pain to pass, and actually thought of it as, this is an opportunity. I feel like disability is often talked about as a creative generative force, so, instead of thinking of it as, oh, like my residency's ruined because I'm having this flare up and you know, all the things I could be doing if I wasn't in pain right now, instead to, again, like reclaim this idea and think, no, actually being flared up is going to be the creative

portion of this residency, this is... being in pain is generative to the project right now. And then I start thinking, okay, this [00:20:00] belongs in a series. So it's, you know, "Room Studies: Lisbon", "Room Studies: Columbus", Room Studies, you know, it's like all the rooms that I'm in and the experience of pain in all of them.

David Staley: How do you convey or represent pain and disability on film? 

Kym McDaniel: That's such a good question. I think there's two thoughts right away; the first is through voiceover. And so, even though it's, I have a very hard time starting more kind of scholarly writing, I've always been a more creative writer, so I don't have a difficult time writing poetically or journaling or, yeah, coming up with a script.

And so, I think exercising voice for me through writing a voiceover is a way to actually release some pain, and it's a way to invite people into my experience. So, I would say through voice or text is one method, and then another way is through the way that I'm [00:21:00] framing the images. And so, in my earlier work, I used a lot of fragmentation, so I never really showed the whole body.

I never, you never got like a wide shot of me, you know, ever. It was always a closeup of an elbow or a closeup of a knee or a foot or an ankle, and to me that was a metaphor for actually for pain, and you know, where pain from my experience is that it can be really localized, and so the framing of the camera was an extension of how localized the pain felt in my body. 

David Staley: You've described your creative process as improvisational, or there's an improvisational nature to your creative process. Say a little more about that and about your creative process more broadly. 

Kym McDaniel: The way that I work in production is improvisational in the sense of I don't storyboard, I don't even... 

David Staley: You don't storyboard? 

Kym McDaniel: I don't storyboard. I [00:22:00] usually don't even have a shot list. I really follow my intuition or I have an image in my head that I want to put into real life. So, in that way it's an improvisation, 'cause I have no set plan going into it other than the image or the excitement around doing something. I think I often talk about filmmaking and editing being an intuitive process for me, and as somebody who lost her intuition, that editing was actually like a muscle that I, like ,strengthened through film editing. I think I got injured because I lost my intuition in that moment, I wasn't taking care of myself, and I'm not saying this to blame myself, but I just really was pushing myself so hard and kind of forgetting who I was and wanting to please the professor I was working under at the [00:23:00] time, wanting to please other people in the cast, wanting to kind of like, please, you know, really just denying my experience of what my boundaries were for myself.

And so, when I came to filmmaking and started realizing that I knew exactly where to edit, I knew exactly where the cut was, it was this like, revolution for me in the sense of like, I was practicing my intuition in the editing room, but then that translated to my, my real life. Like, I started realizing in my real life that I needed to be following my intuition like I was in the editing room.

And so, I think all this goes back to improvisation. I think improvisation is a very intuitive based process, and so on one hand it's very embodied because of that, and then I could also say like, I experiment with different technologies and those technologies, I am interested in creating improvisation structures with those technologies.

So, kind of using [00:24:00] older equipment, analog equipment, or in one of my films, I used like a broken digital camera and I didn't know, like it was fragmenting the image and there were colors and it was pixelated, and there was, you know, very, I never knew what it was gonna look like, and that in and of itself, to me, was an improvisation.

You know, I kind of set up a structure and then let the broken camera be the performer. 

David Staley: So you don't start a film or the process with an outcome or an ending. Do you have a plot, a narrative even at that stage, or...?

Kym McDaniel: Sometimes, but sometimes I just get to a point where I'm like, I, I haven't shot in a while and I should shoot something and then I'll be shooting in my apartment or I'll go somewhere and shoot outside and then I'll just dump the footage on my hard drive, and then like, I just am returning actually to footage I shot in 2020 that I think will make it into a project I'm working on now.

And so, sometimes I do have a clear idea. You know, this past summer [00:25:00] I broke my foot and it kind of sent me into a spiral and I was like, I'm gonna make a film about this, you know, about being stuck in the apartment all summer. So, that was more, that was probably the closest to a narrative that I've ever been at.

But normally I just, I'm kind of like montage or collage based where I'll just collect things over time, and then eventually it'll get to a point where I'm like, I think I need to make a film soon. 

To keep my job, no. 

David Staley: So, as part of your research into trauma, you've coined the term memory recall. Tell us, what does this term mean?

Kym McDaniel: Yeah. I think that this started when I was working on this series of exit strategies that I mentioned before, because those films were all about wondering, it was a couple years after that head injury and I had done all the things you were supposed to do, right? Like, I'd done physical therapy and acupuncture and massage and you know, everything you could imagine, and I was still in chronic pain. And I realized the [00:26:00] only thing that I hadn't done was look into my childhood to actually understand like when I was injured as a child, how did I recover? Because children have like an amazing resilience, you know, like they'll fall down and just get back up again, but for some reason there I was like 28 years old and I had fallen down and I was not getting back up again.

So, I knew that it was something that I had picked up somehow, like this kind of chronic pain that wasn't going away. And so, I went back into my childhood and, and those films were kind of all about different memories of trauma that I felt were in my body that needed to be investigated and released and used the filmmaking as a method of that.

And I think what eventually happened was that in the process of making them, I realized that I was getting triggered, like when I would see them scream, so something that I was [00:27:00] making was making me upset and I had a lot of questions about that and I was also... an experience that I had when I was teaching a class when I was in Milwaukee, really stayed with me 'cause I showed a film, it's a film called _You Take Care Now_ by Ann Marie Fleming, and it's a film about a woman's rape and then a car accident that she had gotten into, and I always thought the film was really, I, I still really like the film, like I think it's a really well done film, but I had a student come up to me afterwards who was really shook, and that experience really stayed with me because I wondered, how do we make film about trauma without ostracizing people who are traumatized?

David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

Kym McDaniel: And, I think that question froze me for a long time in my practice actually, and I think how I've come around to it is through my work with internal family [00:28:00] systems. It's a framework, a psychology framework, and in internal family systems, you realize that it's not about ignoring the past or never retelling the past, because I think for a long time I was like, I should just never recall memories from the past anymore because that's triggering. But, I kind of realized that you actually go through a process of being aware that you're recalling memories, so it's a conscious, almost like meditative process where if I'm going to make a film that has to do with a memory in the past, that I am working with that memory consciously, I'm not letting the memory hijack me and take me over,

and be in the present. And so sometimes in IFS, and I'll hear myself saying this too, where I'll say, oh, a part of me remembers when, you know I was eight years old and whatever. And so, just by saying, a part of me, separates it to say like, [00:29:00] not me in 2025 who I am now, it's a part of who I am that remembers that.

So, I think memory recall and my research in that is about working ethically with the past as a personal filmmaker and how do you ethically work with trauma so that you don't re-traumatize yourself in the process? 

David Staley: What's next for you? What's your next risk? 

Kym McDaniel: So, my_ Exit Strategy Number Two_, which I made in 2017, talks about an experience I had in physical therapy in my early twenties,

and I'm actually making that into a longer piece now, so eight years later, I've decided that I'm ready to actually go into the story more. The film right now is around 20 minutes, and then I'm teaching repertoire in the dance department this semester, and I'm working with eight very talented undergraduate dancers, and we're gonna be filming together next month, and then some of the work [00:30:00] and the choreography that we're making in that

process is going to be put into this longer film that I'm making. And I've never done that before, i've never filmed with undergrads and I've never been so directly, even though my position is in dance film, I've actually never made such a narrative dance film in, in that way, so I'm nervous about that.

David Staley: What's gonna be different, as opposed to your other films? 

Kym McDaniel: I think that a lot of... 

David Staley: Just the length, or...? 

Kym McDaniel: The length for sure, yeah. Yeah, I think all of my films are like under 10 minutes, so making something that I'm hoping to be closer to 40 or 45 is a change. But, I also think working with others is... I normally work with myself and I think working with these dancers is a challenge for me.

Not in the studio, not when we were making the dance, but I think once we start the filmmaking process of it, it's gonna be, yeah, I just normally work by myself. 

David Staley: Kym McDaniel. Thank you. 

Jen Farmer: [00:31:00] Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.