Sunday 9 September 2007

Halesowen College, and a trip to the beach with Dad.

I am joining the Halesowen College teaching team as guest lecturer for the week, as they take thier foundation students to Godreavy beach.
Acccompanying them will be Basingstoke College of Technology , staring recently retired and legendary Brian Stevens... my dad. Getting my hopes up for good weather, and the St.Ives Jazz festival as well as some great rocks to look at and some new young people to get to know.

The last Couple of months in brief

Encounter is the first piece in a body of new work that I have been researching since september 2006.
Previously I have made large scale architectural works which have altered the space of their surroundings dramatically and encouraged the audience to move around the space in an unfamiliar way and used colour to provoke sensation. See picture.

The notion of a work drawing attention to body and to a pattern of movement, both physically and spatially lead me to consider using movement and body more directly within my work. How would a dancer experience the work?

This new piece has come out of research into choreography in it's broadest sense and research into rock formation and erosion: form created by movement and natural choreography in the natural world. Here is a list of words that are associated with this piece, to offer a way in, or a starting point for thinking about it in an abstract way.
Converge,
choreography,
fragmentation,
match,
mirror,
replicate,
landscape,
explorer,
miniature world,
double exposed images of venice 2004,
deconstruction of a sequence of movement,
collage,
rehash,
accumulate,
collection of debris natural or manmade,
patterns of accumulation produced by movement,
material deposited by moving forces,
sediment,
rivers,
litter,
collect,
reconstruct,
reinterpret.

This text is not an explanation of the work, but a statement of concepts that were in my mind when it was created, a context perhaps.

The audience was invited into this intimate setting and invited to walk around the work, experiencing it at close proximity from different angles, at times objects within the space appeared in the video that was being projected onto them. There were moments of correlation, fragmentation, juxtaposition, clarity and lack of it, structured in much the same way a piece of contemporary dance.
I had a great response from the audience who found it engaging and it provoked discussion.