Output details

Voice (a retracing) (video/sound work)

with Voice (a retracing): an emerging lexicon

(Online peer reviewed journal article)

Voice (a retracing) is a video/sound work by Midgelow created in collaboration with musician Dr.Tom Williams (Coventry University) and including camera work by Tim Halliday (University of Northampton). It seeks to capture and articulate the dancer’s inner experience of movement improvisation. In doing so, this work layers and distorts video images and uses the dancer’s spoken voice as the basis for an acousmatic composition. The visual and sonic landscape evokes the lived experience of improvised dancing to examine the attributes of improvisation, awareness, attention, remembering and the ephemeral nature of the practice. Given that it is the nature of improvisation to decompose in the very act of appearing, there is a perverse dichotomy in attempting to capture it. Yet in rising to this challenge this work fleshes out the assertion 'that [video] documentation's primary role is no longer preservation.in favour of something that talks adequately to the polysemy of the liveness-representation nexus' (Ellis 2005: 43). In doing so the work contributes to understanding of improvisation and extends discourses of Practice as Research and documentation.

Through peer review processes Voice (a retracing) has been selected to be shown at ten major (inter)national festivals/conferences/exhibitions and on the BBC Big Screens. The work also has an online presence, including a full exegesis, in the innovative international peer reviewed online Journal of Artistic Research (JAR) (2012) (see portfolio).

In the JAR online exposition Midgelow explores the tension between the ephemeral nature of dance, music composition and the videographer's artful endeavour. Notions of composing and choice are present as the collaborators make transparent the methodological aspects of the collaboration and their emergent process. The exposition extends the improviser’s phenomenological stance to include a critical and reflexive attitude, one grounded in some respects in phenomenology, while resisting rushing towards interpretive possibilities.