JUST PAST (2019)
MA Choreography, New Performative Practices
Stockholm University of the Arts, DOCH School of Dance and Circus
PROJECT DOCUMENTATION
Starting with a visit to the Berlin Zoo, John Berger’s Why Look at Animals and Roland Barthes’s essay ‘Toys’ from the collection Mythologies, I embarked on making a work about how dancers are looked at in studio environments.
Tierpark Berlin, bear pen, photo by Andrew Champlin
The work became a short solo study and I experimented with setting the audience outside a window, looking into the studio like a zoo habitat.
video still from work-in-progress showing October 29, 2018
… Also from above, like a Panopticon.
photo: Andros Zins Brown
Using these vantage points, I experienced the work as a camera. I designed a documentation with fixed-camera angles that I later edited into a film called Isotropic Dreams.
film still from Isotropic Dreams, filmed at DOCH School of Dance and Circus, Stockholm, Sweden.
“The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognizes, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult.”
… Visually, sensorially, I found this particular studio profoundly imitative—a modern image of the future of ballet.
costume option, photo by Andrew Champlin
For my final presentation titled Just Past, I presented an evening length theatrical work where I performed with six students from the BA program and one fellow MA student.
Amanda Billberg in Just Past.
The students and I experimented with ways of being seen, by each other through windows, and mirrors. The performers were:
video still from dress rehearsal of Just Past
Additionally, I collaborated with outside-eye Melanie Jame Wolf, lighting designer Niklas Glahns, and sound technician Alexandra Nilsson; with additional help from Alice McKenzie, Andre Soares, Thiago Granato, Siriol Joyner, Lara Oundjian, and Benny Olk.
The work is a part of my history and informs me about large scale collaborations and production.
still image from Just Past.