Siobhan Davies Dance material / rearranged / to / be at Bluecoat
Exhibition dates: 1–9 July 2017
Siobhan Davies Dance’s most ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration to date material / rearranged / to / be travels to Liverpool’s Bluecoat following its critically acclaimed premiere at the Barbican, London and UK tour. Informed by ideas about bodily communication and the latest research into neuroscience, the artists and choreographers investigate what we reveal and conceal through physical behaviour.
Exploring our bodies’ capacity to communicate material / rearranged / to / be is comprised of multiple works by choreographers, visual artists and designers, and includes performance, film projection, and sculptural objects that are presented as an ever-changing arrangement. Visitors are immersed in a live environment that evolves around them. The constantly altering juxtapositions mean that few visitors to the gallery will have the same experience.
Fittingly, the installation comes to Bluecoat in a year when the arts centre is developing its own dance programme, INHABIT – a three year programme of new dance aiming to engage new audiences. Also, Siobhan Davies Dance performer Andrea Buckley is a member of Bluecoat based dance collective LIC.
The artists’ and choreographers have taken inspiration from the practices of the art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg collected diverse images of human gestures and poses from different times and places and positioned them side by side to reveal previously-hidden relationships across time and space. In a similar spirit, this latest work by Siobhan Davies Dance presents a large-scale, modular framework which is continually arranged and rearranged by the artists, creating new pathways through the installation and drawing visitors into a journey of discovery.
Performers engage directly with the public asking them to participate in the expressive 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. A lustrous black, mobile is suspended from the ceiling, its forms derived from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), one of the most influential images in Warburg’s collection.
material / rearranged / to / be features works by choreographers Andrea Buckley, Siobhan Davies, Helka Kaski, Charlie Morrissey, Efrosini Protopapa, and Matthias Sperling; visual artists Jeremy Millar, Emma Smith, and design duo Glithero (Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren). Contributing fellows include Professor Jonathan Cole (neurophysiologist), Professor Guy Claxton (cognitive scientist), Dr. Scott deLahunta (dance theorist), Guido Orgs (cognitive psychologist) and Professor Anil Seth (neuroscientist).
With seven artists and over ten works, material / rearranged / to / be marks Siobhan Davies 70th choreographic work in her career.
Prior to the Bluecoat material / rearranged / to / be has taken place at Barbican, London, Tramway, Glasgow and the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester.
With thanks to generous support from Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation.
Efrosini Protopapa’s work is generously supported by Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Presented in collaboration with Tramway.
In association with the Warburg Institute. The Warburg Institute is part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London.Â
For more information on material / rearranged / to / be visit www.siobhandavies.com
For further details on the Bluecoat visit www.thebluecoat.org.uk Â
