Lizzie Thomson, White Record, 24 Frames Per Second, Carriageworks, 2015 image courtesy the artist |
At the time of Carriageworks’ approach, Thomson was completing her degree in Visual Arts at the then College of Fine Arts and had been working on several of the ideas and the movement research that engendered her live work Panto, an opening-up of her practice to “anything and everything,” described by reviewer Cleo Mees (RT105) as a “loose trying-on and throwing-off of ideas.” Now almost four years down the track, similar investigations inform her foray into screen dance and the creation of her new work White Record (a title she credits to another 24 Frames artist, Brian Fuata).
When I speak with Thomson about her current choreographic practice, she notes the consistent curiosity about embedded histories of dance and art carried over into her work from her research. She says dancers’ bodies have the “presence of different histories” that are both known and unknown. As the daughter of two dancers, the history begins in her DNA; training in a suburban dance school, at university, then dancing with choreographers and collaborators nationally and internationally over the decades, the layers of influence run deep. In this piling on of forms, the greatest challenge came with the teachings of choreographer Rosalind Crisp with her ‘no history’ scores: ‘YES to all’ was categorically silenced by a big fat ‘NO.’ (But then came Panto!)
The mimetic, schizophrenic absorption of “different information” into the moving body (a common story with dancers) has raised the question for Thomson: “What do I do with it all?” From this place of questioning, she has found 24 Frames the perfect platform to take an objective view of all these influences, not solely from beneath or beyond her dancing body, now up on screen, constituted and fragmented in its two-dimensional mediation. She understands that screening the body posits her as a “choreographic object to study” (in the William Forsythe sense), allowing an unravelling of her own histories, and the opportunity to see deeper cultural connections.
Caption Lizzie Thomson, Panto, 2011 photo Heidrun Lohr |
White record is a four-channel video installation projected onto four “life-size screens configured as a square” to give the audience a “three-dimensional experience.” They will be free to enter at any time during the 8-minute looping solo. The sound is being engineered offshore in Oakland, California by another Aussie, Kevin Lo, and will be a 10-minute loop independent from the image. The work has been filmed by Sam James between the “great bright orange pillars” of Kings Cross Car Park below the home of Alaska Projects, and edited as a complex conversation between angles and the four screens by James with Thomson’s sister Gina. Artist Agatha Gothe-Snape is conceptual consultant on the work that has finally come together in discrete phases over many locations.
24 Frames was “conceived in response to a shift towards interdisciplinary and collaborative experimentation in contemporary artistic practice” (Media Release). The artists have had no opportunity to meet, share skills, or participate in discussions about their works or the aesthetics of this “nexus between film, dance and the visual arts.” But as an exhibition and not a screen dance festival, we as visitors can together participate in the ontology and future of screen dance in this country come June 18.
24 Frames Per Second, Carriageworks, Sydney, 18 June-2 Aug
RealTime issue #127 June-July 2015 pg. 9
© Jodie McNeilly; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]