The
brochure describes this exhibition as a full colour, stereoscopic,
dance-screen installation but believe me, that's not even the half of
it. Think of it more as a shopping basket full of
dance choreography, 3D spectacles, eight wall length video screens, the
ladies toilets and there you have it, one of the latest exhibitions to
grace the Walsall Art Gallery. The gallery alone is wonderful,
it's as if it has just landed out of nowhere, a modern architectural
beauty and coupled with an exhibition such as this, you can tell this
Art Gallery is only going to progress further with more innovative
works from visual artists, painters and sculptors alike.
Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie choreographed the exhibition, which focuses
in representing the movement of one individual being reproduces by
other character and creating something not unlike a slow music
video. However, it's not that simple at all, the artists decided
to present the movement in a sort of stop motion using stereoscopic
cameras producing two almost identical images that when looked at with
the right pair of spectacles turned into a 3D performance. Liz
Aggiss is a performer/choreographer/film maker and Professor of Visual
Performance at the University of Brighton and Billy Cowie is a
choreographer, director, composer and a Principal Research Fellow in
the School of Art at the University of Brighton. They have been
collaborating for 25 years making over twenty live performance pieces
for their company Divas and have toured Europe
extensively.
Q; Why exactly did you chose to
produce such an exhibition in this particular format as well as based
within and around the Walsall Art Gallery?
A; The architecture of the New Art Gallery is very striking and provided a
perfect 'set', the lines are clean and uncluttered, the space has an aural
sensitivity as well which could be amplified within the accompanying
sounds cape. The idea of locating this piece as a site sensitive screen
dance installation provides a fresh way for an audience to not only
view the work but also see the gallery as site. The piece itself
becomes less of a 'home' for the installation more a fluid space for
convergence, it moves the audience more towards a space for engagement,
which has parallels with live performance aesthetics. The audience,
during their visit to the gallery can enter these 'real' spaces within
'real' time in the new art gallery: ladies toilets, gallery room,
benches outside, restaurant, and are consequently reminded of a virtual
presence and performance time that has been explored within them. The
result is that the audience is more of an active participant,
questioning space and choices that have been made to complete the work.
Because the piece is composed of thousands of tiny snapshots, the
audience is encouraged to be visually and aurally sensitive to the
space, which they occupy. The use of digital media again blurs the
boundaries between the still and moving body and opens up the
possibilities of mediating one discreet practice though another and
allows a re-visioning of what can be, and is considered screen dance.
Although the work obviously has a special resonance being shown at the
New Art Gallery, we are confident that it will retain its impact in
different ways when shown in other galleries.
Q; Movement is essentially a key
concept within the work; would you say the movement in each piece
represents a sort of conflict, or relationship or both?
A; The constant figure (Liz Aggiss) that appears in all four films is
continuously plagiarised. Wherever she goes within her real and virtual
site she has no respite. You could well ask, is this asking a broader
question about individuality, surveillance, conflicts arising from
sharing space, creative license and copyright?
The choice of which film to place by which film was considered once all
four were finalised, and the final decision lay with the visual and
aural components. The fact that the material is looped means that the
same relationships across all four-film sites never appear twice. Thus
at times conflict is evident and that depends on the audience remaining
with the images longer than the fleeting attention given to much
visual art film installation.
Another conflict within our work is in the relationship between
'normal' so-called pedestrian movements and more structured
choreographic vocabularies. In Doppelganger, due to the photographing
of each instant separately, even the most pedestrian movements had to
be minutely choreographed, thus allowing us to explore in detail the
grey area of the boundaries between the two types of movement.
Q; Why did you choice stereoscopic over just filming?
A; Our previous work 'Men in the Wall' which ran at the New Art Gallery
last year was also 3D four screen dance installation and used red and
green anaglyptic glasses. Doppelganger was an opportunity to further
experiment with the format but this time using paired images with
special prismatic glasses, which allowed a full colour image and a much
greater sense of depth. The paired images also were in keeping with the
Doppelganger concept thus allowing the audience to view the work either
stereoscopically or not, further compounding an active audience
response. As with 'Men in the Wall' we are interested in the 'rounded'
body and the way choreography is affected by the focus given to the
third dimension.
The exhibition will continue until 23rd April 2006 at the New Art Gallery Walsall.
Aggiss and Cowie's book Anarchic Dance published by Routledge, Taylor
and Francis is now available, comprising of a book and three hour
DVD-Rom, and is a visual and textual record of their live and screen
dance work.