I recently attended some events as part of Juncture, a festival of contemporary dance in Leeds, which this year was curated by the truly amazing Gillie Kleiman. Kleiman’s area of interest and research includes how dance functions in the world, in professional and community contexts, and in relation to politics and cultural policy. From hearing Gillie speak and talking with her, I have developed a new understanding of contemporary dance that really shifts it into the same realm as contemporary art in my mental landscape, in terms of it’s potential to make powerful statements, speak to a broad range of people and contexts, and affect change in the world. Dance as something tangible, pragmatic, and close.
One of the pieces presented at Juncture was Swarm Sculptures by Lucy Suggate. It is a durational movement installation, which recruits people (anyone, not professional dancers) in each city it takes place in. The choreography is influenced by swarm intelligence and uses the body as a sculptural material. What I like about this work is the way it uses touch and intimacy to transgress boundaries. Someone in my group suggested that it demonstrates the different kinds of touch (like a ‘practical’ reason to touch instead of a sexual one) which brings into focus the ridiculousness of some cultural taboos around intimacy.
“The work plays with the tension between momentum, suspension and weight of our form combined with the boundless limits of the human imagination. A swarm of figures traveling through the exhibition space, transforming it into a performative one” From the Dance4 website, who are one of the organisations who commissioned the work.
Looking closer at the idea of applying humans to swarm intelligence, we can think about mass-movements of people, ranging from global migrations to safer territories to the rush-hour commute. Humans seem to gather, in small or large groups, but very rarely live completely isolated for long periods of time. We might like to think of ourselves as a higher intelligence than bees and insects, but when viewed from a far enough distance our behaviours probably don’t appear so different. And yet despite our tendency to swarm, we maintain a cool distance from one another, avoiding eye contact on a packed train platform, holding our form so as not to touch the person next to us in a crowd, pretending that the other people in a busy street are merely obstacles to maneuver around. Suggate’s piece compels the participants to overcome these feelings of distance and coldness to instead become close and intimate with the other performers, familiar with their shape, using their form as an extension of their own to complete the piece, transforming into a communal and collective body.
References:
- Artsadmin (no date) Gillie Kleiman. [Online] Available at: https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/gillie-kleiman [Accessed: 3 November 2016]
- Dance4 (2016) Swarm sculptures. [Online] Available at: http://dance4.co.uk/event/performance/2016-02-21/swarm-sculptures-0 [Accessed: 3 November 2016].