Output details

Step Feather Stitch : Duet performance based on an unfaithful reading of embroidery and social dance instructions. Media: Dance/voice/recorded composition/sewn paper sculpture. The output for REF is a portfolio containing recordings, images, sewn scores and other supporting contextual material including co-authored article (Brixey-Williams, Julie & Worth, Libby ‘Step Feather Stitch: an unfaithful reading’, Choreographic Practices, 2012, vol.3, pp.43-63).

Funded by the Stanley Picker Trust, this performance was a development from a work-in-progress duet The second line of long-and-short, facing performed as part of POLYply 6: The Score (13 January 2011, Centre for Creative Collaborations, Kings Cross, London). The research enquiry spanning these performances focussed on processes, strategies and concepts to generate shared artistic terrain for dancers and visual artists. Worth (dance) and Brixey-Williams (visual art) sought interaction across art forms using the medium of ‘the score’ to facilitate the process. Instructions for embroidery and for social dance were applied in reverse (sewing the dances and dancing the stitch patterns) to disrupt settled working practices and preferences.

Coincidently, the choice of materials (photos, cigarette cards, folk dance and social dance manuals, embroidery books etc.) all came from the early twentieth century; provoking new research centred on the tension within UK women’s traditional roles and newly found elements of freedom between WW1 and WW2. This focus permeated aesthetic decisions on colour, costume and patterns of step.

Such tension was replicated through working with both the formal construction of embroidery and social dance alongside their (inevitably) messy ‘reverse’ side. Vocalising dated instructions resonated in the present eliciting a surprising range of female voices from public to private, meditative to resistant. These were explored both within a composition created by Elias Kotzias and live in performance.

The article was co-written by Worth and Brixey-Williams as a visual essay that reflects on and records some of the processes of making Step Feather Stitch. Its intention was to make scores and processes available, as well as to document this specific piece.