Output details

Things that start slowly: Screendance triptych 2010

Things that start slowly is a Screendance triptych compiled from footage shot over a period of two years. The central image is a shot of a baby feeding from its mother. On either side of this there is footage of two dancers at different stages of pregnancy. The images of pregnancy are intercut with a progression of black and white still images of a ship sinking.

Focusing specifically on the temporality of loss, the research enquiry explores the ways in which the relationship of movement and stillness, within screendance works, construct perceptions of time. This focus, which draws on both recent film theory and psychoanalytic discourse, also offers insights into the broader tensions within Screendance, between predictability, stillness and death, and contingency, movement and life, as articulated by screendance analysts such as, Brannigan (2011) and Rosenberg (2012).

One example of the work’s connection between movement, time and grief, can be seen in its marked use of long continuous shots with no edits, or dynamic shifts, to divide time into narrativized events. Arguably, these sequences create a sense of continuous ‘now’, as opposed to the marked then and now of edited, linear narrative sequences, a state, which I suggest, resonates with the unarticulated timelessness of trauma (Macdonald 2013) and its associated loss of belief in the ‘predictability of events’ (Garland 2002).

Its triptych structure offers elements that simultaneously move through time, and remain present at all times. This ‘moving stillness’ is reflected in its placement as both an installation and a single screen work in galleries and festivals. This ‘moving stillness’ is also a key part of the work’s visual exploration of how we embody loss, in terms of the body’s ability to be both permanently marked, and constantly moving forward, in time.