Thursday was an exciting day. I invited dancer Sophie Tickle to come and work with me on the development of my ‘Migrate’ work. It’s previous incarnation is a performative piece that I created at the Drawing Exhibition in Castlefield Gallery back in February. That work comprised a projected line mapping a route of migration where I repetitively stamped increasing numbers and arrows backwards and forwards within that flow. Following the production of the work I felt that it lacked choreography, and that the link between the projection, the performative action and the finished work was not strong enough.
I’ve collaborated with Sophie during a networking session in St Helens – a visual artist was randomly assigned a non-visual artist to work with for 4 hours in a local library – and I found it interesting to see how my work crossed over with the practice of a dancer. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but just never had the reason to.
So, on Thursday I asked Sophie to respond to the migration subject matter as she would if she were creating a dance piece. We each created gestures responding to synonyms of the word ‘displace’. The difference between Sophie’s actions that used a wide range of expressive body movements and my own, limited, isolated movement was an interesting counterpoint.
We went on to string these gestures together, and it was interesting to think of timing, variables in speed and dynamics of movement and how this can accentuate and abstract a starting point.
Thinking about the different types of movement led onto a discussion about characterisation – the different parts of my work being different characters (the projection, the logical numbering stamp and the performer)
We have all day on Monday together again when we will integrate video, projection, stamping and performance and see what happens.
