Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux

“I’m a dancer. When I trained to be a dancer, I was taught to be malleable, flexible, available, strong and to learn the movements of others as quickly as I possibly could. I was essentially training to be a manual labourer.”

Sarah Wendt

Performed movement-poem with video-delay, responds to issues within the art world relating to working with dancers’s bodies and physical practices as resources and/or material. It draws from texts such as In praise of the dancing body (Sylvia Federici) and Sara Wookey’s seminal essay Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects: Concerns of (a) Dance Artist(s). It also draws from personal experiences working as a dancer and choreographer in collaboration with visual artists and is in part a response to seeing how institutions program and credit dance and dancers in museums.
In this creative partnership, we respond together to our individual questions. The body, space and objects are positioned in non-hierarchical relationships at the core of our collaborative art practice. We explore the application of choreography as sculpture and movement as material and we consider the value of human energy in relation to material cost, issues of labour, artistic legacy, and authorship.

Scenario:
On a small stage, a closed-circuit video camera is filming the projection of its own video signal with a 10 second delay. Between the camera and the projection, a lecture and choreography takes place. The result is a mise-en-abîme of the performative/compositional process. It becomes a visual echo, as we see the reader and their movements projected with multiplying layers of delay into a retreating video dissolution.
The video it creates live, results in an accumulation of archived choreographic and visual material and thus, acts as a short-term archival device, which can be played back in the presence or absence of the performer.

Part 1: the talk
A video of the performer working with objects and space plays on the large screen while she speaks into a microphone with modulated sound, reading the text/poem live.

Part 2: the dance
Video delay starts on screen. Performer begins movement section, which plays behind her in cascading multiplication in a 10 second delay. Talk is replayed and becomes the soundtrack.

Part 3: the transformation
Performer puts on costume and returns to centre stage to repeat movement wearing hood/costume. Poem is replayed with another track added on to create multiple layers and several versions of the poem. She performs another layer of poem in song form live.

Part 4: the archive
The initial dance is replayed on screen, performer sits and watches this in front of screen, still in hood (various things can happen here, various uses of the archive, open-ended.).

A first version of this work was titled Work of the dancer: a short-term archival device and was shown in the conference context of Flotilla, the biennale gathering of national artist-run-centres in September, 2017, in Charlottetown, PE. This piece is both a finished work and an evolving creative process. Variations in the text and evolutions in the staging are likely.