Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Chester
SCHUHT. Created dance work for camera. The dance film was created for the Growing Older Disgracefully Dance Company (GODS) and was Arts Council funded. It was shown as part of the opening of Capital of Culture, Liverpool.To date, it has been toured nationally and shown at numerous conferences.
SCHUHT is a short film created for Growing Older Disgracefully Dance Company (GODS). The play between remembering, articulating and expressing memories formed the basis for this dance work. Other key themes within the work are that of appearing and disappearing and being visible or becoming invisible, all of which hint at how memories through the body are written and re-written, are vivid, fading or erased. The medium of film was chosen to act as an archive and, as such, is a representation of the archives of experience of the dancers ageing bodies, as well as a physical archive of memory that captures a specific moment in time, thus representing a mobile archive. Paradoxically, the performance events captured in SCHUHT are safeguarded as a form of permanence - of memory rather than loss.
Generating dance material for SCHUHT was driven by somatic inquiry and autobiographic writings/scores, both of which encouraged the dancers to sensitise themselves to 1) time - past and future framed as being in the present; 2) architecture of body/bodies and place; and 3) the mobility and responsiveness of their ever changing and evolving bodies/selves. This approach is further demonstrated in the recent development of a sensitive and discreet methodology termed Autoscores© that traces intuitive responses to self, other and environment as a creative mechanism for performance and dance making.
The Arts Council of England funded the project. Daniel Williams from Moonman Media and I collaborated on the project having been commissioned by GODS to create a new work for them at a time when Liverpool would be celebrating being the Capital of Culture. During the making of SCHUHT, GODS was an all-female company whose ages ranged from 50 – 80+.
