Vincent Ho's Supervillain √âtudes are inspired by six of the supervillains from comic book culture of his childhood. Ho found that each of these villains are extreme expressions of psychological disorders and decided to dive into their psychological profiles collaborating with choreographers to see their takes on animating each of the profiles. The Supervillain Études take gestural cues from choreography while maintaining the profiles and personalities of the aforementioned supervillains, forming a compellingly moody, exciting, and villainous set of works.
Études 1 - 3: R1ddler, 2-Face, and P3nguin, are published in Volume 1.
Études 4 - 6: C4twoman, Poi5on Ivy, and J6ker are published in Volume 2.
A couple years ago I had this crazy idea of writing a set of etudes for solo piano and I was inspired by the supervillains of the Batman universe. It just dawned on me that they were case studies of various psychological disorders or mental disorders. The villains aren't put in a prison, they're put in Arkham Asylum, suggesting that they all had some sort of disorder that manifested in criminal form.
I did a deep dive analysis on their psychological profiles and personal histories. Taking these profiles, I decided to hand them over to three choreographers asking them "if you read these profiles, how would their physical languages be, how would you create them as choreographers?" It was a fascinating process seeing how they recreated their own take on each character.
I then took the footage of these choreographers and decided to try to recreate these gestures in pianist form, hence Éudes. It was quite the adventure as I was not only trying to capture their spirit, their characters, but I also wanted to capture their mannerisms.
