Object Project (2020) is collage-like performative video work that utilises bright colours, industrial and uncanny objects. Taking Meg Stuart’s ‘Transformation’ improvisation as a departure point, the protagonists in this piece, including myself and two other dancers, follow a series of daydreams and mental escapes into small transformations via urban explorations and the performers’ own imaginations.
During this work, the trio allude to various aspects of art history - the Renaissance, Romantic Era and Pop Art by embodying their values to soften the industrial void they are dancing within, question their surroundings and physically defending each of their ‘dream spaces’ through theatrical breakouts. Conceived to be an improvisation series that is part-score, part-spontaneous, these aesthetically designed encounters between the body, industrial and theatrical props bring the spontaneous wanderings and powerful yearnings of the dancers into the visible realm through duration, repetition and transformation.
I introduced choreographer Meg Stuart’s task Transformation from one of her many exercises in Are We There Yet? (2010) as a 5-minute improvisation task that was integrated into the filming process. Each of the dancers, including myself, used this task, in combination with an object.
The ‘transformation’ exercise is an easy one that grounds people, in contrast to the jarring quality of ‘change’. It is one way to access trance in improvisation, which is an aspect to why we chose to introduce house, hip-hop and urban music to our ‘transformation’. Hybrid bodily practices, such as hip-hop, offers nuanced postcolonial perspectives, identity politics and grants transcultural artists opportunities to develop and transmit bodily knowledge. The repetition and synths found in these types of sounds allow one to find a trance-like state. The exercise requires both insistence in repetition and a surrendering to the material that appears.