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(no title) (2018)

I begin by lying at the foot of the rock wall, holding it as if it were a partner sleeping. After some time I
slowly negotiate my feet and body to turn over myself and roll to the next position. I enter a number of
images that activate meaning in the unique space via my body. I become covered in rock dust, and once
naked, small grazes and cuts against the textures of the room. The images include: reclined over the ancient
clay oven; balancing inverted on the fence; being swallowed by the oven; having a silent conversation with
my upper body hidden; emerging from the oven naked as if being born; rolling into a ball at the foot of the
rock; balancing naked on the fence and slamming into a large wooden beam; hugging the beam. This is a
series of negotiations with body in specific space that raises issues of care, desire, violence, relating,
vulnerability, as well as the disjunction between the image and the experience of the body.

Centro Negra, Blanca | AADK Spain, October Open Studio, 27.10.18


Note: images © Jose Manuel Parikmaker (2018)
Solo for a Body (2018)

I roll backwards slowly and constantly throughout the piece, interrupted by a series of actions that suggest
desire, power and failure. These include: posing in front of a theatre lamp; banging my head into the way;
falling into a leg split. The rolling continues in between each and I eventually roll out of my clothes to full
nudity. I activate further poses including inverted crucifix; rolled into a ball; archetypical female muse;
stiletto walking. The tasks in between invite failure, collapse, exhaustion and my skin visibly reddens under
the exertion. I aim to disrupt a smooth reading of the (young, white, cis) female body, to expose how looking
and feeling are troubled in the performance setting.

Laurie Grove Studios, Laban postgraduate showcase, 20.7.18


Note: images © Billy Sassi (2018)
Pomodoro (2016)
This work repeatedly draws analogies between the vulnerable flesh of tomato and human flesh, increasingly
more violent and sexualised, as the performance space becomes messed with squashed tomato.
'Weber’s imagination has grasped a powerful allegorical image' - Nicholas Minns, writingaboutdance.com

Blue Cloud Scratch @ Blue Elephant Theatre, July 2016


Emerge Dance Festival @ The Space, November 2016
Balances in Central London (2017)

A series of sustained balances ‘en relevé’ (on the balls of the feet) in public locations. The position is held as
still as possible until failure. It quietly provokes the public space, as an act of self-exposure against norms of
public behaviour while conforming to certain tropes of feminine posture and being on display.

Note: images © Billy Sassi (2017).


Stiletto Piece (2018)

A movement path sustaining a rise on balls of the feet through a theatre space, simultaneously activating a
trope of classical technique (the ‘revelé’) as well as the performative gendered association of high-heeled
shoes. The path slowly maps possible directions within the constraints of the posture. Conceived as a live
performance and/or video work.
On Unstable Ground(s): The Relevé and the Role of Practice-as-Research in
the Traditional Institution (2018)

Paper and performance at The Artist as Researcher | University of Bedforshire, June 2018.

Abstract This performed presentation follows a solo investigation situated within a three-month studio
research period at Accademia Nazionale di Danza, Rome. The project comprised of movement-based
laboratory sessions three times weekly for three months, accumulating as a solo performance and post-
performance discussion. The enquiry sought to excavate classicism in the author’s body in order to
interrogate the embodied ideals of traditional Western technique. In particular, the relevé was explored as a
site of cultural-physical-political significance. Furthermore, locating this research praxis within the
traditional academy disrupted expectations surrounding the trained body. Choreographic outcomes are
performed to activate the research in the current presentation setting. The author identifies the bodily
interface of practice-as-research and classical dance training as a possible site of further investigation, and
offers some questions for consideration following this research process.

Excerpt […] (Begin to rise to relevé while reading)

In particular, the relevé was explored as a site of cultural, physical and political significance. The Royal
Academy of Dance ballet glossary (online) describes relevé as the action of a dancer rising up onto demi-
pointe or a fully en pointe, and also describes the discrete movement that involves the sudden transference of
weight onto the balls of the feet or toes. I use the term relevé as the general state of being on one’s tiptoes,
and as a term for the general demands of classicism on the feet. These demands require hypermobility
expressed through a high arch, flexion under the toes and a heightened neuronal control to isolate intrinsic
muscles beyond pedestrian use.

In line with Western dance's idealism, the relevé carries the implications of dancing and living with an
artificially elevated centre of gravity. This has been discussed at length in dance scholarship (ibid.); some
suggestions include an elevated sense of self beyond the body, a Cartesian sense of mind over matter, and an
anthropocentric disavowal of nature through and beyond evolution.

The relevé presents a gendered muscular tension in the body, ripe with typically feminine associations:
stilettos, Barbie feet, postural demands associated with a femininity and so on. Through my work, I was
interested in reclaiming the body objectified into existing with a lifted centre via this movement capability,
and expanding the possibilities of a given movement imperative. The technical (female, or feminised) body
exists as a site of fluctuating agency: subjected to patriarchal forces of bodily control (Foucault in Lepecki
2013, among others) but at the same time, arguably more powerful and capable through this process of
subjectification. Technical capability disrupts clear agency as the embodied ideal shapes the agent moving in
that way. The act of raising oneself up onto the shaky ground beneath the balls of the feet is at once
precarious and exalting; there is the negotiation of balance, and likewise the negotiation of a technical
demand and an active capability.
As a solo project, using the relevé meant engaging with my body in the ways it is most aligned to the
technical body as a broad concept. It is a technical ideal that I have embodied through training and through
the selection process of bodies otherwise called facility, which is archived and resurfaces in movement. This
was formed through a studio process that centred on choreographic tasks and instructions pertaining to the
feet or in relation to the relevé. Such tasks sought to disrupt the straightforward engagement with the relevé
and explore it’s potential as a paradoxical restriction in the creation of new possibilities. These become
choreographic material that was collated into the solo performance (Teatro Ruskaja, 26.3.2018).

Limiting the surface of contact from the ground, raising the centre, the relevé became a site of inevitable
failure: but failure as creation, submission as creation, and the act of self-imposition blurring the grounds of
agency and subjugation. Deliberately falling and failing, in order to resist structures of success created space
for something else, and allowed point of eventual capitulation to gravity. […]

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