Le Murate_Firenze

DANCE UNDONE
Repositioning Choreography in Contemporary Arts Practice
Events, Works, Installations

A site specific project co-curated by Tony Thatcher, Head of Choreography at Trinity Laban of London, and artist/producer Mariana Lucia Marquez

Tony Thatcher and Mariana Lucia Marquez have curated a creative grouping of professional performance installation works that include pieces from emerging professionals and recently graduated students of Trinity Laban. They would like to acknowledge the support of Trinity Laban and OAC. 
The event as a whole proposes seeing performance and choreography as part of a wider interdisciplinary cultural space, where choreography in particular attempts to avoid the standard contexts in which dance is presumed to be seen and performed.

Installations / Performances

Edge-Park :: video/installation
video: Valentina Lamantia
music: Jonathan Owen Clark
An initiative of OAC Collective - Martina Francone and Hrafnhildur Einarsdottir Under the initiation of Vincenzo Casali Architecture and the support of Tony Thatcher and the kind support of CFLI di Venezia

A collaborative work of video art, architecture, dance and music. The video installation shows images/postcards in movement, in which space and time are decomposed thorough the use of the video. The moving body in space composes clean frames, changing the perceptive and perspective
view of the architectural sites. The still image of site in the background, reflects the solitude and the emptiness of the site, while the small moving image interprets it and inhabit it.

Untitled Thresholds for g(l)azed Confit :: visual art/installation/performance
for audience of one
concept, performance, film-editing: Isabelle Jendrulek
collaborator and performer: Sarah Cattrall
performer and photographer: Henryk Hetflaisz
performer, psychotherapist and collaborator: Robert Palmer

In Untitled Thresholds for g(l)azed Confit the spectator is the masochist, desirous to be punished.
The artists become both story and character showing the precariousness of conditions we are accustomed to call normal, blurring boundaries between the stage and the performer, the marginal and the conventional in an Audience of One/Installation context. The things a spectator does in an
intimate and highly physical space has a direct influence on the performance.
This piece taps into the gaps between performance, spectatorship and participation. The unique perspective is to question these gaps through the use of multiple situations of submission and dominance between bodies and their agency. The intention is for the participant to recognise these
shifts that query the identity or truths between bodies.

A Darkened Room :: visual art/installation
concept and paintings: Miraj Ahmed
movement investigations, collaborator and performer: Tony Thatcher

A Darkened Room explores perception and experience in the viewing of two dimensional artworks and the choreography that occurs within the gallery space. A series of works on paper placed and mounted at various positions within the darkened room invites viewers to become accustomed to
darkness and perceive works in the low light levels. The viewing of paintings with the light removed makes one aware of ones own body, its adjustments and stances in the search for an image. Tony Thatcher will also perform a piece within this space, further exploring the heightened experience of movement and proximity.

Site-seeing from left to right :: video/ installation
concept and films: Kelly Chorpening

I consider Site-seeing from left to right as a drawing made with light. The piece is made mostly from animated still images of project lines of light within a domestic interior. The sound makes tactile the moments when light meets surface.

-scape (2) :: video/installation
choreographer: Tony Thatcher
composer/sound design: John Drever
performer: Emma Redding

A collaboration with sonic artist John Drever and performer/collaborator Emma Redding involves a changing installation of sound, movement and settings and locations on the Goodwin Sands - a series of sand banks eleven miles long and six miles across, lying six miles off Deal and rounding
the North Foreland in the English Channel.

Nomai :: dance and live music
choreographer: Martina Francone (OAC Collective)
composer: Morton Feldman
performers: Martina Francone, Hrafnhildur Einarsdottir
lighting design: Vincent Field

Nomai is a minimal piece that explores energy in relationships and investigates closeness and distance on a physical, mental and sensory level. Inspired by the work of Gerhard Richter, Nomai works composes images and blurs them, creating ambiguity and avoiding imposing a meaning.
The space, used in a formal and linear manner, and the perception of time are the core of the exploration. The pace of the piece allows the audience time to immerse themselves in the images and the attitude of the performers welcomes the spectators into the work.

Unfashion :: site-specific dance
choreographers: Marquez&Zangs
performers: Diina Bukareva, Alenka Herman,
Mariana Lucía Marquez, Emma Zangs

Deleuze and Guattari once described a type of machine that works by breaking down. This, in turn, reminds us of a story told by Jérôme Bel. A dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet has a difficult landing after a double pirouette en l'air and receives a much louder and emphatic applause
at the end of his solo than all other soloists. Failure on stage, rather than undermining the performance, adds something to it: a surplus, an artistic value.
In Unfashion, three dancers and a choreographer stage a fashion-show-like performance that continually undoes its own idioms. We ask what it means to be live on stage: choreographing in real-time and redrawing of the lines of the ‘catwalk’, we trick ourselves to in the "here and now" and hope to fail.

Satisfyin’ Lover :: dance
from a score by Steve Paxton
realisation and direction: Martin Hargreaves assisted by Tony Thatcher
with Students from Trinity Laban  and local guests

“This dance is about walking, standing and sitting. Try to keep these elements clear and pure” (Steve Paxton 1968).

Paxton’s score is reconstructed by a core group of dancers who have recruited and guided other performers from Florence. Through a focus on a minimal range of actions the intention is to explore the range of complex and sometimes idiosyncratic choreography involved in everyday activities. A review of an early performance applauded the presentation of “every postural possibility in the postural spectrum, that’s you and me in all our ordinary everyday who cares postural splendor”(Jill Johnston, 1968)

Score (-stance) :: dance and live music
choreographer: Tony Thatcher
composer: Kim Helweg
performers:
dancer: Ina Dokmo
viola: Nic Pendlebury

The five sections of Score fall naturally into time frames of between 1’26” for section one to 3’36” for section five. The score of the five complete sections lasts for around 14’ 30” minutes. The section durations act as significant framing devices for the work as a whole and mark the bar line for the beginning and end of a section. These are also recognised as a change of movement tone and colour both for the performer and the alert spectator, to distinguish one section from another.
Towards the end of the score these bar lines become somewhat hidden, recognised usually by the dancer only. Throughout the work there is no metric beat. There is no measure of linear time other than by means of a stopwatch which marks the duration for each movement / choreographic
section.

ReBodied :: dance and live music
choreographer: Diina Bukareva
dancer: Antti Kankainen
musician: Markus Tapio

The work presents an improvisational approach to investigate both movement and sound through memories of sensory experiences. Returning to their visual notes (drawings) Markus Tapio and Markus Tapio have re-embodied their original studio experiences. In this process original memories are shared and re-lived in a new time and space.

[photo Tony Nandi]