Artist Manifesto
Manifesto
Case Studies
Words are useful and ease communication, but they allow for deception. Art has the possibility of being a mute expression of the bodily truth, we have been deceived in the day-to-day to forget.
The world isn’t good and isn’t bad, it just is, so in every piece of work there should be as much of both, as one has in their life.
“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth” – Pablo Picasso.
I do not agree. Imagination has been seen as a do-er of lies and I aim to show that it is made of limitless truth of the unconscious, even though it challenges reality.
Colours, colours, rhythm, colours.
Case Studies
PINA BAUSCH (choreographer)
Pina Bausch was born 1940 in Solingen and died 2009 in Wuppertal. Her work, and now her company’s, combines poetic and everyday elements. Her work is considered to have decisively influenced the international development of dance and revolutionizing it.
I met Pina Bausch for the first time in 2011, in a biographical film about her life called ‘PINA’ created by Wim Wenders. At the time I studied in a ballet school and hated the strictness of all the rules that classical ballet requires of the body. Watching Pina was like breathing mountain air-free, natural and with an unmistakable presence.
Bausch's theatre is an unflinching look at reality, yet at the same time invites me to dream. Her method of choreographing began with the production of ‘Macbeth’ but took the form she is recognized for in the production ‘Blaubart’. For ‘Macbeth’ she was required to work with only 4 dancers, the others, actors and a singer, which meant traditional, physically demanding movement were inaccessible. She then set questions or stimuli for the company to improvise upon, emphasising on collective memory.
She is revolutionary and has always reflected the emotional needs of her time. I wanted to use her method of visualizing contemporary emotions, in 2020/2021 those are isolation and motivational drought. I chose her production of 'Blaubart', as I watched it live at Sandler's Wells for my second-year module 'Dance Theatre'.
‘Blaubart’ is a story about violence and toxic masculinity based on a Gothic German Opera of the same name. John Rockwell describes the women in the show as ‘sad sacks’, which he meant as an insult to the piece but turned out to be the perfect description of the tired natural bodies, the pile of women, objectified and entombed by the main male character. I want to use the idea of natural tiredness in my choreography.
Bausch is blamed to have indulged in barbarism and in 'pornography of pain' but I find this to be a candid reflection of reality. Dance is about the body and it remembers pain best, thus it shouldn’t be ignored but explored.
Pina piles up images, which relate associatively or ironically to the narrative, and the dismemberment of the story. I want to explore this technique. In ‘Blaubart’ the feeling of being drawn together runs simultaneously with the sense of rejection. The conflict and tension between an individual’s inability to survive without others in society and the need to be alone is a problem tightly connected to my journey in life and within our piece.
Pina wasn’t revolutionary only in terms of ideology and directing, but of her acknowledgement of mental health for the first time in dance history. From another Pina performance ‘Café Muller’ I took the element of bursts of violence followed by long periods of stillness and recontextualized it from the male-female relationship to mental health and one's battle with themselves. I also loved the sleepwalking vibe of almost all the movements of the women. There was pressing loneliness, which I tried to incorporate in my own dance.
TOM - Populating the World (2020)
Created by Wilkie Branson
Wilkie Branson, New Wave associate artist at Sadler’s Wells and Playtime Artist at PDSW, is an interdisciplinary dance artist and film maker. Self-taught in both dance and film, which form the main focus of his work. The roots of his practice lie in break dance and street style. Wilkie is recognisable for his synthesis of expression, accessibility and innovative techniques.
I watched TOM virtually in September 2020 and was a grasping experience, created using handmade models which were digitized using photogrammetry. It took 9 months to build over 100 models that were used to create the environments in the film. The photogrammetry process took a year to complete with a quarter of a million photographs being used to reconstruct the models digitally. All the performers in the film were shot on a homemade green screen stage in the garage, using a treadmill and revolve to match the perspective of camera moves from the film. There are over 400 different versions of Wilkie in the film who is joined by his 3-year-old nephew, Eben, to complete the cast.
TOM is a story about one man’s journey of rediscover of who he is. A universal story about identity and struggling to understand our place in the world, which is tightly connected to mental health and our loneliness in society. All of the locations of the story are in someone’s mind and the audience is witnessing how that person has refracted the real world into the imaginary. TOM incorporates the everyday habitat and thus it starts one tube train. Joe and I took that idea and decided on furthering the introspective mode of the story to separate ourselves into a representation of our inner worlds that ended up in very different locations from the city habitat.
We used the ‘Creation & Process’ videos, descriptions and interviews with Wilkie to try and understand his methodology and adapt it to our project. Wilkie built a home-made green screen studio and had process video we watched and dissected. Then we tried to do something similar on a lower scale and no budget, having Joe implement his newly-found lockdown interest – 3D environment development, and for me to try out choreography and editing.
Additional Reading