Veronica Malinay [The Barn Dance]

Growing up in Virginia, I thought fireflies were the same everywhere: glowing balls of yellow light that emerge at dusk, slowly flickering on and off. Discovering that fireflies do not live in the Pacific Northwest, I was excited to share that evening light show with my west coast colleagues. At Overlook, dancing lights in the meadow greeted us. Unexpectedly, the show of these fireflies was a spectacle I had never seen. Instead of a yellow glow, these fireflies spangled the fields with a flashbulb-like light.

Hundreds of these bright white flashes sparkled like fireworks. I was in as much awe as my west coast companions. These fireflies signified the uniqueness of place, and marked the beginning of the UO Landscape Architecture invasion of the east coast.

The story of this kind of firefly revealed itself as an age-old tale where girl attracts boy with flashing light, boy falls in love and envisions a life with the girl, and girl in turn sees boy as dinner and eats boy: the female fireflies of the genus Photurius flash their light to attract and prey on the males of the genus Photinus.

To capture the dance of the fireflies and tell their story, I brought the meadow indoors and set up a drive-in theater at the fireflies’ scale. After one long night in our barn-turned-studio, we found ourselves upstairs having ourselves a good ole fashioned barn dance in the style of the fireflies, without preying on each other, of course. We captured this dance on video, and from that moment a whimsical story of the fireflies, the meadow, and the barn entwined to form The Barn Dance.
-VM