STRANGE MOODS AND DISSONANT FEELINGS / Work of the dancer
2017
Video installation: performance, projection, video delay
42 minutes
“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
This piece is both a finished work and an evolving creative process. It draws from texts such as “In praise of the dancing body” by Sylvia Federici, and Sara Wookey’s “Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects: Concerns of (a) Dance Artist(s)”. It functions on two axes: personal experiences working as a dancer and choreographer in collaboration with visual artists; secondly, a response to how dance and dancers often exist on the margins of art museum culture. Are dancers' bodies and physical practices resources? Material?
The installation sets up choreography as a means to coalesce sculpture and movement. On a small stage, a closed-circuit video camera is filming the projection of its own video signal with a delay. Between the camera and the projection, a lecture and choreography take place. Archived choreographic material results in a mise-en-abyme of the performative/compositional process. Becoming a visual echo, these elements interrogate the following question: What is the value of human energy (in relation to material cost, labour, artistic legacy, and authorship)?
Press Esse 94 - Labour
2018
Author: Marie-Pier Bocquet