Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Winchester
Vanishing Point Dance
This project used the frames and codes of art gallery spaces to dissolve potential zoning boundaries and allow different viewpoints. Responses and feedback were gathered during 16 promenade style presentations where audience and performers assembled in different orientations and proximities. The project used workshops in;
Traditional Malay and Bharatanatyam forms focusing on small, detailed articulations contrasted with full-bodied movements.
• Functional movement with objects/props to foreground corporeal treatments, ie body weight as a force, unravelling costume dimensions over distances, coiling and folding materials with body/parts.
To explore scale in space design, traditional methods for perspective making in Fine Arts were used; ie planes, levels, parallels; repetition in linear and circular pathways; vanishing points, bodies within landscapes of geometric forms; miniature ‘theatre boxes’, animating objects; torch light/ projection shadows.
The findings were tested through a 50 minute work which used music, mobile set and scenographic costume.
Insights were gained: the potential kinesphere of movements was clearest in performance modes which emerged from a combination of focus, proximity & presence resulting from the size of actions and their kinespheric location. These determined proximities and locations for viewing and determined the nature of the performative exchange.
Audience behaviour, response and 4 post performance discussions confirmed that immersion in a mobile, multi-sensory environment without zoning boundaries created a strong kinetic empathy which could be equated to intimacy, in terms of ‘distance’.
Insights were shared in practical workshop projects at 10 institutions/ organisations. Lecture-demonstrations outlined insights in relation to embodiment and culture.
