STATEMENT - Click here to view as PDF
In this work I acknowledge multiple layers of place as a way of experimenting with how to present the embodied dancing body through performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. I work with the notions of embodied place-making and proxemics as a way of activating a new relationality to my material within the desktop. Instead of focusing on how to transfer the practice into the digital realm, I work with key functionalities of the desktop to work with what this context could offer my work rather than dwell on what is not possible.
This work proposes the desktop as a site for performance. Drawing from Nick Kaye’s theory that site specific art is defined as being conceived for a special environment from which it cannot be separated and that the work might articulate itself through the properties, qualities or meanings produced in the specific relationship to the site or position it occupies (2000).This taking into consideration specific properties that the performance works with in order to develop a site specific relationship with the desktop, for example the placing of the dancing body into boxes, the use of the cursor as a guide for perception, the capacity to multiply myself in movement, the word document to communicate with spectators.
I have filmed movement material which explores my research into surrender as an unfolding process in movement. The process of my dancing body moving within a space, I refer to as what Setha Low defines as Embodied Space. She defines this as ‘the location where human experience and consciousness take on material and spatial form’ (2003,p3). This idea of Embodied Space is what becomes lost when spectators and performer are not sharing physical space together. The sensation of the movement, the touch, the sound, the felt experience of being in proximity to the one who is moving does not exist. With the knowledge that I cannot share this Embodied Space with the spectator, I created a relation to space which would serve the existence of the movement material within the context of the desktop. This includes the fixing of perspective, the creation of a “void space” through the framing and use of the black box setting and the placing of myself within a box (the window of quicktime player). In the moment of moving, the camera acts as a witness to my process, replacing the audience and aiding to create this flat and fixed perspective that will later be presented through the desktop.
I would propose that this performance brings multiple layers surrounding the production of place. I am referring to place within this context as what is addressed again by Low as embodied place-making (2003). This meaning that place is formed through every moment of the body’s spatial configuration over the duration of a dance. As Valerie Preston-Dunlop suggests ‘dancing bodies enter and move through, in and with space turning the void into a place’ (1998, p121). Attending to surrender through the movement process is itself a proposition which is intangible, not visible and in my thinking formless. The emergence of movement to explore this concept could be said to start to bring meaning to this void, thus creating a sense of place. In my practice I work with the idea of “returning to movement” as an ongoing daily practice. It is not only a return to the state of surrender but also to the place in the body/mind which is created through that practice.
By situating the work to be viewed in video conferencing, I am creating another layer of an understanding of place. Within the video conferencing space spectators are virtually together, next to each other in boxes on the screen, but physically and geographically distant located in their own spaces. To heighten this experience of layered place, I play with how Edward T Hall’s notions of proxemics can be re-thought of in this context. Hall’s theory is based on the notion that people’s use of space derives as an aspect of culture and he outlines an innate distancing mechanism that humans have into four categories - intimate, personal, social, public (1966). The categories define certain behaviours or actions that people generally undertake through those distances. In the defining of these categories he speaks through physical interactions between people involving touch, smell, sight. Through the work I play with what proxemics and understanding of place could mean in this digital environment. At first there is an obvious play with this visually in the sizing and arrangement of the boxes of the videos. These adjustments however, do not actuate proxemics in how Hall defines them. There is no changes in sensation or affect for the spectator only an understanding that the size of the box has increased. Proxemics is instead addressed through how the work is fundamentally brought together. I filmed the work on 25 February, I made the screen recording on 3 March, the performance takes place on 5 March. Each event, has its own construction of place embedded within it. In the recording of the screen sounds can be heard from the place of which I recorded the screen rather than the sounds from the movement material. This gives the sensation of distance or disconnection to what is seen on the screen and what is heard. This reiterates a certain paradox which is being experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic, the attending of events in spaces we are not with the mixing of the everyday domesticity of life.
Within the work there is a section of which I multiply my dancing body, showing a repetition of the movement material in a composition across the screen. This actively uses a feature available on the desktop (duplication) to play with if this alters how the spectator perceives this movement. At the end of the work, I stop the videos and type a memory of being in this place of an unfolding surrender in relation to the current place I am in. It is a collision between a memory of sensation from the past with the present experience of doing this recalling in the conditions of the place I find myself in.
*Please note, through the process of making this work, I understand that the different aspects (perception, notions of space/place, proxemics) could all be expanded upon singularly to be developed in fuller detail. Due to the limit on time for performance, I opted to explore several ideas and create a short dramaturgy through the work.
LIST OF REFERENCES
Hall, E.T. (1966). The Hidden Dimension. USA: Anchor Books
Kaye N. (2000). Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documen- tation. London and New York: Routledge
Low, S.M. (2003). Embodied space(s): Anthropological theories of body, space, and culture. Space and Culture, 6, 9-18
Preston-Dunlop, V. (1998). Looking at dances: A choreological perspective on choreography. London: Verve Publishing
Evidence of the 5 experiments from the INTRAPLACES module can be found here: https://ellatighe.hotglue.me