Doing Dancing

Rhiannon Newton

Opening 02.08.18 6-8pm
Artist Talks 24.08.18 6-7pm

Doing Dancing considers dance’s relationship to duration and it’s potential transformation into an archival object. Beginning from a singular written archive, a series live performances are traced by co-present digital archiving system. Gertrude Stein’s written portrait of modern dance icon Isadora Duncan becomes a historical referent, which supports a practice of eternal danced returns. Automatically positioning dance in a western canon, this text acknowledges and provides an active surface from which to resist a sanctioned narrative for dance and expand toward more speculative histories / futures for dancing in.Stein’s original text “Orta or One Dancing” is transformed beyond the solo matriarchal dancing body, so that the dancing subject becomes “he”, “I”, “it”, “this”, “you”, “we” and “they”.

In a two-hour durational performance each translation is read aloud and respectively danced. Each act of dancing is produced by each act of reading, or is imagined as continuation of Isadora’s dancing via Stein’s writing. Each action of dancing and reading also accumulates, in an embodied and a digital sense, those preceding it. Over the course of the exhibition the live event is performed firstly as a durational solo accumulation. Secondly it is performed as a shared collective undertaking. In this group version each action of reading and dancing is performed by a different artist, who each bring with them their own history, practice, or approach to dancing.

Remaining in the exhibition space between each live event is a video and sound archive of the accumulating performances. This archive is programmed in such a way that each layer becomes an equal percentage of the whole. Therefore the image of the moving body begins to fade, ghost-like toward invisibility, whilst the unmoving room and its objects endure permanently in the accumulating document. Similarly in sound the recorded voice approaches obliteration through noise, as the many voices speak together in cacophonies of imperfect unison. In a more gradual and processual way the archive begins to mirror the live event’s ephemerality and the residual dance becomes an increasingly ghosted document of movement’s disappearance.

Performances:
Wednesday 2nd August 6-8pm
Saturday 12th August 3-5pm, also with Brooke Stamp, Ivey Wawn, Lizzie Thomson, Trish Wood and others.
Saturday 19th August 3-5pm