Night moves

Zsuzsanna Soboslay: Wendy Morrow, Sleep

Trevor Patrick, Wendy Morrow, Sleep photo Dean Golja

Sleep was performed for 3 nights as a movement/installation in the white space of the Canberra School of Art Gallery in September. It comprised a continuous soundscape by Mary Finsterer, video and projections by Dean Golja, an oversized roll-out mattress by Kate Murphy, and ideokinetic movement by Wendy Morrow (floor) and Trevor Patrick (suspended in a harness in the gap between 2 angled blank walls). Video and projections play across their bodies and the walls, and along the length of the room in front of the audience. Held together by tone and shifts of intensity rather than narrative, each element held equal weight for the work’s 25 minutes, making a democratic, subtle and open-ended psychic journey for the audience

He: hangs, suspended in a space between walls (where 2 walls fail to meet, or have just parted), an illumination from behind his body, from whence he’s come; his bony cheek rests against the vertical precipice, he contemplates the beginning or the end of his life. There are shuddering moments, moments more muscled than others; a glimpse of emotion cooking through to the surface, then dissipating, gone. Why does he sleep? Who does he sleep with? Is it this woman; himself? Is his body so alone, except for the surface of the winding sheet? The projected face turning against the longer wall, his momentary lover, or not? I fall, I fall. Babble beneath the white noise. What time, are we sleeping? White knights, sleeping-in, no time, (no) endgame.

She: jiggles, once. More, leans against the wall. Perhaps frustrated, perhaps emptying herself of the day, perhaps failing to gear up for another. Her dark curls more prominent than her legs. Where are her thighs? Where has she gone? There is no mattress here. A long-standing punitive. (What.) Slumping body. Sometimes I forget about her.

There are hints here of inter-relationship: between bodies, minds, twitches; strangers keeping their distance; lovers who that night forgot to nod and touch. Am I responsible for this shadow, passing, trying to come. My neurones dislocate and rewire. Is this world after all the more important, sifting, sorting, conditioning the more conscious one? Amongst all my comings, doings, namings...this is a piece (of dust, to which I will return) that is yet the confluence of all my streams (of thought and substance). Masterful, as is the petal pushing open the flower.

Sleep. A post-modern nocturne, direction, concept, movement Wendy Morrow, movement Trevor Patrick, visuals Dean Golja, sound Mary Finsterer, sculpture Kate Murphy; Canberra School of Art Gallery, Sept 19-21

RealTime issue #52 Dec-Jan 2002 pg. 26

© Zsuzsanna Soboslay; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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