Week 9 - Costumes, Props and Sets by Deborah Light
Our weeks provocation was to ‘Think about our past processes. Each artist locates an object, or wearable or construction/stage set, that you think wasn’t used to its full potential.’
From this we quickly arrived at a collection of objects and wearables that were of interest to us. They were not necessarily un-fulfilled in their past iterations, in fact we were satisfied with how many of them had been used… but they still held interest and potential for us… a new context could give them new possibility.
It got me thinking that any object/set/costume does not have a finite set of possibilities but that it’s relevance, impact, and resonance is entirely shaped by it’s context.
The question became what items do you want to work with.
We assembled an array of seemingly random objects: astronaut suits, money, a plant, cables, apples, a yellow swimsuit, fans, electrical items and an inflatable octopus suit.
We also had a multitude of bulky clothes these were an attempt to represent Jo’s desire for a panda suit.
We recognised the selected items have a multiplicity of meaning/or reference points.
Our interest didn’t settle on any of these as individual elements but evolved into a preoccupation with the combinations and juxtapositions of these elements and the body in space.
I offered some frames for our activity:
The choreography of objects
Installation of the body
Creating sculpture
Balancing space/objects body
Transformation of objects through the body,
and transformation of the body through objects
In the evolving absurd landscapes something significant appeared:
Moments of recognition, of shared understanding, of emotional resonance.
Matter has power, history, agency and, in relationship to the body, brings up common references. Objects have the ability to provoke the imagination, narrative, individual interpretation and shared understanding.
For example as Jo said:
‘There was a radical shift as the cash entered the space, an embodied felt-sense of every individual's relationship to money - desire, need, repulsion, jealousy, homelessness, survival within capitalism.’
We hung onto this clarity. We recognised our activities as a potential performance frame and a way of working through our current socio political and climate context.
We called it
‘‘moving through our collective bleakness within a buoyant space’’.
The work became a collaborative process of searching for connection, meaning and relevance.
Together we were searching for an activity, mode or image to commit to: a place where we could enter an imaginative realm.
A place of ‘no despair’.
There were some key references during the week:
In particular Agential realism/theory of Intra-action by Karen Barad Feminist Physicist/Social Theorist and the idea that ‘things emerge through their relationships with each other’.
Dry your tears to perfect your aim - Jacob Wren
Douglas - Robbie Synge
YARD - Allan Kaprow
10 principles of Burning Man
Some words of reflection on the landscape we inhabited:
Absurd
The astronaut encounters a plant
Lonely bodies
Desolate
Landscape of debris
Co-existence
Things don’t work
The Need for clean air
The Need for clean water
Women in a swimsuit
A fish out of water
Apple
Barriers, clothes, protection , hiding, comfort , separation, isolation
The maths doesn’t work
Flooded with information
The on-going even in the absurdity
Written by Deborah Light, in residency at National Dance Company of Wales, with Jo Fong and Anna Seymour
