Kai Goh
“Extravagance is the name of the game. It can be easy to forget that less can be more.” Kai Goh’s words strike a chord - considering art is often appreciated in small video segments and instagram stories, extravagance is more important than ever in catching the viral public eye. Yet Goh seems to have mastered a balance of art and spectacle, creating drone videos in collaboration with dancers, gymnasts, and more.
Goh comes from a break dancing background, a street dance form which involves a significant amount of improvisational skill, ingenuity, and strength. Break dancing and other street forms encompass an enormous cultural history often left out of academic teachings, and street dancing is still a relatively unusual sight in mainstream media and even more rare to see on a stage. It’s an excellent choice for drone filming, with a single dancer typically in the limelight, and certainly an art form that could enjoy a bit more recognition. “The breaking/street dancing scene has been my bread and butter for the last few years, and I want to keep level-ing up the possibilities there,” Goh says, “But I have to also check myself: is this productive? Is this helping the intention? Are we putting this in for a purpose? Do we just think it’s cool? Can we make it both, ideally? You never want to overpower your message.” Less can certainly be more, here.
Apart from ensuring his films have a positive, meaningful impact, Goh’s collaborations can additionally be immensely tricky to pull off. Shots are done in one take, and almost all of the work is done the day of - but the results are worth the effort.
So how can complex collaborations like this go smoothly? Goh feels that one of the most important strategies is constructive feedback. “A lot of artists have a lot of talent, and that’s great, but they don’t always voice what they’re thinking. It can lead to resentment - worst case scenario. [Whereas] people who voice what they’re thinking, who voice objections, that can really help.” Collaborative efforts can often end up turning into more of a directed project, with one person taking over the artistic goal. True collaboration, however, needs all parties involved. “We think we’re making everyone’s life easier by following people’s directions. There’s a time and place for that, but if you have insight or perspective that I don’t have, I would love to hear it.”
In future collaborations, Goh hopes to continue expanding his artistic style and forging a path for this relatively new method of film: “I want to make people go ‘wow.’ In the future [I hope to be] working on a bigger scale, specifically with the fantastic, or special effects, doing things that you wouldn’t normally be able to perceive or film in real life, but with a drone [it becomes possible].”
To check out more of Goh’s work, follow him on Instagram @kaivertigoh https://vimeo.com/552136291/399c91c291
