Siobhan Davies Dance: material / rearranged / to / be.
Performance times:
Saturday 6 May: 10am-4pm (including Saturday Supplement, 11am-4pm - see event details below)
Sunday 7 to Wednesday 10 May: 10am-4pm
Thursday 11 May: 10am-1pm (no performances 1pm-5pm), Thursday Lates: 5pm-8pm
Friday 12 to Sunday 14 May: 10am–4pm
Exploring our bodies' capacity to communicate, the work includes performance, film projection, and sculptural objects that are presented as an ever-changing arrangement. Visitors enter the gallery and are immersed in a live environment that evolves around them.
Artist Jeremy Millar provides a structure and concept for the work inspired by the practices of the art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg collected diverse images of human gestures and poses from different times and places, positioning them side by side to allow new relationships to emerge, and explore how meanings are constituted by the movement of imagery across time and space. In a similar spirit, material / rearranged / to / be presents a large-scale, modular architecture which is continually arranged and rearranged by the artists, creating new pathways through the installation and drawing visitors into a journey of discovery.
The artists and choreographers in material / rearranged / to / be have combined Warburg’s ideas on bodily communication with the latest research in neuroscience to investigate how movement is felt, observed, and we reveal and conceal thought in physical behaviour.
Works include choreographies on concepts of instability and disorientation, how we archive or remember past movement, along with a taxonomy of imaginary actions. Performers engage directly with the public inviting them to participate in the aggressive bodily postures and rhythms associated with argument, or to think about how we feel in relation to the actions of another through everyday activities like shaking hands. A looped video projection that oscillates in the space between live movement and recorded image highlights how our embodied intelligence anticipates future events.
Saturday Supplement: Material / Rearranged / To / Be
6 May, 11am-4pm
All events are free, no need to book.
An extraordinary day of performance, workshops and conversations alongside Material / Rearranged / To / Be, a new work by Siobhan Davies Dance. The day will feature insights and explorations on the work from leading artists, makers and thinkers. From hands on family workshops to tours and talks from curators and scientists, this day will shed light on the thinking behind Siobhan Davies Dance’s most ambitious collaboration to date.
Family Workshop: Neuroscience & Movement
11am-12pm
Location: Barbara Brown (Gallery 5)
Playful activities enabling families to work together creatively; exploring their body’ s remarkable capabilities to move and relate to one another.
Talk: An insight into material / rearranged / to / be
1pm-2pm
Location: Study Centre, lower ground floor.
A talk discussing the ideas behind the multidisciplinary performance installation material / rearranged / to / be, and the collaborative creative process used to make it.
Lauren Wright, Siobhan Davies Dance Programme Director in conversation with Jeremy Millar.
Workshop: material/ rearranged / to / be
2.15pm-3.15pm
Location: Barbara Brown (Gallery 5)
Practical activities exploring the ideas within performance installation material / rearranged / to /be.
Film: The Running Tongue
11am-4pm
Location: New Arrivals II (Gallery 3 )
A film installation by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton. Defying the usual conventions of cinematic form, the film is edited live in real time by a custom-programmed computer which makes its own decisions about how to order the narrative. This means that the work can run forever and never quite play the same way twice. The changing order of events and different juxtapositions of sound and picture continuously offer up new ways to read the images and stories.
After the Whitworth, the installation will tour to the Bluecoat, Liverpool. For more information visit Siobhan Davies Dance.
With thanks to generous support from Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Presented in collaboration with Tramway.
Image: Loop Atlas by Matthias Sperling part of material / rearranged / to / be (2017) by Siobhan Davies Dance. Photo by Pari Nadei.
