Choreography for Clapping Music, 2023
Stage: Terracotta gestures, Wood, Paper. Silk Score: Hand Dyed Silk, Greek Silk/Linen, Costume Remnants, Dyed Rope, Cotton Rope, Shackles.
This work is a collection of choreographic objects that sit in the space for activation. It includes a ‘silk score’, which is an homage to Clapping Music by Steve Reich, a composition for your hands in which the body becomes the instrument. An archive of terracotta movement artefacts transformed by dance work as theatre weights holding down the curtain/silk score, paper, and wooden sculptures. These terracotta gestures are made from a choreography of words in collaboration with dancer Chloe Leong.
The silk score is attached from an original fixture of SCA Gallery which occupies what was once a gymnasium, bringing a poetic atmosphere to the original use.
These performance instruments are an invitation to a communal dance. Activated weekly, dancers are invited into the altered stage. Every rehearsal of this transmedia choreography is a unique performance.
In the studio, dancers respond to the words of the artist, animating clay shapes placed upon the surface of the wooden object. The resulting artefacts preserve both the words and movement of that moment within terracotta. Here, we see an example of how we can push dancers to move differently, so that, collectively, we can think differently. Making way for new forms of movement, pieces within a group-exhibition as dance turn into a living organism.
Here the artist motions towards the beginning of a choreography of words, objects and people moving together to the rhythm of our errant time.
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to ceramicist Hayley West and dancer Chloe Leong for collaboration on the terracotta gestures as well as Lisa Dwyer for sewing support on the silk score and Romello Pereira for documentation.
