The International Journal of Screendance Volume 4 is now online, including my essay
“Cutting across the century: an investigation of the close up and the long-shot in “cine-choreography” since the invention of the camera.”
Really looking forward to some fascinating reading material!
Do have a look and let me know your thoughts.
Title quote from Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings, p.253
Bill Viola’s words have crystallised something for me. They connect many of the strands that seem to crop up in my work… the experience of the body, of time, of the landscape as a physical thing. The body as conduit of the experience (simultaneously) of time and landscape, the body as a landscape in the frame.
Or rather, I don’t know if these things are apparent in my work, however, they are things which inform the choices I make.
As well as the sight of landscape, the sound of landscape enters the works. The sound of the rain and the wind in Snöplog. And Figure(s) became a sound piece – a “sculpting of time” (Viola again) through sound, object and body – falling beans alluding to waves, pebbles and the time of landscape, of the body, not of the mind.
“If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.” Bill Viola
Cited here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bill_viola.html#DzmPS0ioD0Puf5Fw.99
Points of departure
At once energetic, totemic, classical, abstracted (some more than others) and celebratory.
This is a description I wrote of some of Henry Moore’s Reclining Figures that were exhibited in the gardens at Hatfield House during the summer of 2012. The figures, mostly female, are reclining, however they emanate both a sense of groundedness, their totemic limbs firmly planted into the floor (or the plinth), and a feeling that they are just on the brink of movement. Looking at other classical representations – in the Western art tradition – of the female form, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Gotzius’ The Sleeping Danae Being Prepared to Receive Jupiter, I notice a softness and fluidity of form that contrasts the energy and strength in the Moores. Taking this contrast as a starting point, I wanted to investigate how these two physicalities both feel – to embody them – and look.
Image by Jennie Howell
Jennie Howell and I performed a version of the improvised piece I am researching, Figure (s), for an invited audience.
Some of the useful thoughts that arose in the discussion afterwards included:
– The delicate and precarious movement between my body and the plinth – am I going to take the weight/is it going to take me – gives rise to lots of metaphors and connotations.
– The choice of sound-making materials are reminiscent of the art of foley and create a visible relationship between the body/the movement and the sound.
– What can we do to warm up, to prepare for this act of improvising together? For something which has elements which remain, but which is always new?
My favourite images of Kate created by Jennie.
“Photographing gravity” ?
My favourite images of Claudia created by Ryan.
“Making the invisible visible.”
Creative and reflective session at the University of Brighton.
Ryan commented that he found it interesting how the different weight of the beans and the stones caused a certain kind of organisation when the box moved.
Claudia commented that no matter how you move the box, it is always perfect however it lies. And that the things in the installation, including the box, become themselves. I would like to try to translate these notions to the live work that I am creating.
“Beauty untouched by humans”. Is this what we feel is landscape?
Framing the body and composing with it,
Framing devices,
The human subject as dancer (everybody is a dancer),
and the humanity of the ‘dancer’.
The juxtaposition of the everyday with the choreographed,
Improvisation in performance.
– How adept I am with technology (even in performance mode).
– How much technology I use in the performance.
– The delay in the projected image causes the viewer to question whether it really is a representation of me. This reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that through the camera lens, “The sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the hands of technology”, and of Rene Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (1933)
As Magritte wrote:
In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. This simultaneous existence in two different spaces is like living simultaneously in the past and in the present, as in cases of deja vu. (My italics)
Quoted in Torczyner, Harry, Magritte: Ideas and Images. New York, 1977.
This simultaneity of past and present interests me… and leads me to Bergson and Deleuze’s notions of simultaneous, but differing durations.
The body in the ‘landscape’. The body in a tactile ‘natural’ sonorous material. There is something about the fragile, decaying quality of the dry leaves and the vulnerable body beneath that draws attention to the body’s fragility, its mortality.
I particularly like the exclamations of the audience as the leaves are blown away from Yeh Tzu-chi’s body.
KATY PENDLEBURY 
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