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GESTURE LABS
Building on the growing material of recorded and archival footage of working gestures, I am developing participatory and collaborative works where audience is invited to respond to recorded visual and aural material of body labours.
Photo ©James Robertshaw
Gesture Lab 1 MIRRORING & ENACTING
[Participatory public installation at One Hoe Street. Commissioned by Artillery as part of Waltham Forest art trail and London Borough of Culture programme]
Developed in collaboration with a neuroscientist Adela Desowska, we presented selected footage of working gestures and asked visitors to mimic a range of movements. Public was invited to interact with archives of body labours, fragmented semantics and gestic sounds. Participants response to stimuli of different modalities was measured in a purpose build booth. Their gestic responses were viewed live [shadow projection] and recorded for further study. Concept draws on Frank Gilbreth’s chronocyclegraphs, Laban/Lawrence kinethography and manual hielogryphics of Francis Bacon.
Gesture Lab 2 BODYWORKS or WORK IN THE HEAD
[Performance session facilitated as a part of OPENLAB programme at Chisenhale Dance Space. Invited by Antonio de la Fe]
_____From notes on a hairdresser : a self-choreographed dancer performing with unruly matter, an aesthetic therapist in a social contract of trust, a creative cutter in search of beauty. An unmoving and unmovable model reduced just to a head. Extended gaze and smiling effort. Heat, disinfectants and deadly-sharp objects.______
This OPENLAB session at Chisenhale Dance Space draws on my research of everyday working gestures, of what happens at the moments of interactions between different materialities. A moment of engagement with an object (human or non-human, a massaged body or a building scaffold) becomes a space to perform material resonances and create poetic metaphors. I call this moment object-gesture.
I will extract from the material of recorded gestures, dissected phrases of instructions and echoes of physical impacts. I propose we take a journey across these networks of material, emotional and metaphoric overlays. What will occur if we traverse physically, poetically and askew: mirroring, enacting and imagining? Can this working gesture inspired thinking lead us to new universal meanings and imaginary choreographies?
GestureLab 3: BODYWORKS REIMAGINED
[Installation commissioned by Artillery as a part of Walthamstow High Street pilot. Sponsored by Mayor of London]
Video installation based on imagined choreographies of gestures and recorded body movements. These projections were recorded during the first public GestureLab at One Hoe Street, where participants responded to archives of recorded body movements of people at work.
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