Transparent

Transparent is a film created in collaboration with David Hinton and Hugo Glendinning. This work evolved from the research through practice of an earlier work (Transparencies), and both draw on my ongoing study of the Mnemosyne Atlas by German art historian Aby Warburg. The Atlas is a collection of thousands of images of humans gesturing from the history of art and popular culture. Warburg used these images set in dynamic relation to one another to chart gestures across time and space, arguing for universal embodied communication.

Transparent is constructed from a series of collages including the work of visual artists, sports photography, the imaging of sciences, each concentrating on an aspect of human or animal action. The film focusses on simple movements common and recognisable to us all, but these different disciplines add their own distinctiveness through the eras, perspectives and materials they use to capture movement. The interaction between them brings a fresh insight into the physical fluidity and depth of movement between all things. Each still or brief animation sourced from over 100 people, institutions, personal photographs and a spoken text represents a physically remembered moment from my childhood to now and these underpin me as an artist while also embodied into the arc of my life.

Transparent is my third film and these have extended my choreographic practice outside the studio. I have learnt to recognise and use the intelligences I have developed physically and transfer them to structuring text and imagery without losing my use of a felt sense. This will lead me, in the future, to unpick some of my digital archive created with Coventry University by injecting my combined experiences of different people, materials, processes, tangential ideas which I now see as a truer, but too often unseen, foundation for the making and archiving of dance.