I’ve been working on a new project at Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts (LICA), based at Lancaster University. The commission from live@LICA was to create work that involved the use of a series of PD-Net screens across campus and which combined the areas of film making and performance. The work is still in progress, and due to be completed and performed on the 10th and 11th May as part of the Curate the Campus Festival.
The work is called: Where am I? Four thoughts on displacement. It consists of 4 stations. Each station is located at a different space on campus.
The first is set at the LICA building. The audience stands on the bridge outside. a dancer can be seen in the lobby area of the building. S
he is filmed by a camera above her. Her movement describes a space she is trying to get out of, looking up to the camera as though she is stuck beneath a glass surface. her image is projected onto the water, so that it looks as though she is trapped below the water’s surface. the audience can see both a profile of the dancer in real life and in real-time and her projected image on the water.
he is filmed by a camera above her. Her movement describes a space she is trying to get out of, looking up to the camera as though she is stuck beneath a glass surface. her image is projected onto the water, so that it looks as though she is trapped below the water’s surface. the audience can see both a profile of the dancer in real life and in real-time and her projected image on the water.The second in outside the Nuffield theatre, where I use two false window frames (ie frames that are set into the stone work, but then filled in with bricks) as the frame for the image. A dancer stands below a tree in the adjacent square. She is captured from a camera in a window above the audience’s standing area. Her image is projected into the frame of the window. She moves as though she is looking down into the audience’s space from above them, and holds onto the side of the window ledge etc watching as people move below her – eventhough she is actually only to the side of them. Watch a video of this here:
The Faraday foyer. the attached image of the screens shows the set up here. Three adjacent LCD screens show a camera view of the space infront of them. The pics A B and C show the image that is shown on each screen. In A an imaginary door frame is superimposed on the image of the real space. In B a Box is placed in the space. In C a frame. The dancer has to interact with each “object” without losing the illusion in the space.
View a video of this here:
The last installation is set up in a POD (see outside view picture). The picture
of the actual piece was taken in daylight so is perhaps less effective. here I decided to use pre-recorded material taken inside the LICA building, where the dancer is lookin
g up at the camera. I will also be capturing some material from the nuffield window to place onto the card shape. I still have some work to do on this set up, since I’d like to find an object that really holds the shape of the movement. My idea here was to take the same idea of using the projected surface / structure as the motivation for the movement, but on a small scale, investigating the space offered by the objects, as mini structures in themselves.
of the actual piece was taken in daylight so is perhaps less effective. here I decided to use pre-recorded material taken inside the LICA building, where the dancer is lookin
g up at the camera. I will also be capturing some material from the nuffield window to place onto the card shape. I still have some work to do on this set up, since I’d like to find an object that really holds the shape of the movement. My idea here was to take the same idea of using the projected surface / structure as the motivation for the movement, but on a small scale, investigating the space offered by the objects, as mini structures in themselves.View a video of this material here:
The theme through the piece is this notion of displacement between the live movement in the real space and the space that it appears to interact with, ie: the projected space. I am interested in how the set up directs the dancer’s movement. Watching the dancer attempting to fit into the spaces, for example, the way she feels restricted even though she is standing in an empty space. It gives her movement a task based quality, and her performance presence a feel of concentration and focus. It’s performance but with a very real and necessary motivation, as opposed to having a dancer just moving around in arbitrary patterns.
