Between Form and Formlessness: Reimagining Architecture of Body in Space
Mentor 1
Maria Gillespie
Location
Union Cinema
Start Date
5-4-2019 1:00 PM
Description
Our research project with Associate Professor Maria Gillespie focuses on the investigation of corporeality as it is experienced, perceived, and constructed in space and architecture. We are conducting movement research that questions how meaning, power, and desire are made legible and palpable when the body and its relationship to space emphatically impact each other. This project deconstructs and then reconstructs the body in space through movement that co-exists with sculpture, sonic, and spatial gestures. The potentials and limitations of architecture and material lead us to find both poetic and political resonance in the dance making and performing experience. Our research is based on two movement experiences defined by structures and sculpture, demonstrating how bodies make space. In our embodied practice, we find spatial and kinesthetic methods utilizing rope and plexiglass to create a tactile relationship between the moving body and architectural structure. Harnessed by ropes, we suspend from the ceiling and each other, finding strategies that create a freedom and virtuosity that was not possible before. This harnessed relationship to gravity provokes the compositional complexity of navigating the duality of form and formlessness and durability and impermanence. We collaborated with UWM Professor of Sculpture Glenn Williams who designed and created a seven-foot ramp made of plexiglass and steel. This sculpture both reveals and contains our bodies to forefront the desire of viewing juxtaposed with the vulnerability of performing. The ramp also shapes and expands our movement beyond quotidian use, gesturing towards human potential. Our choreographies explore the possibilities and limitations revealed when the assumption of the ephemeral body is complicated by the “permanence” of architecture. The research has manifested into a site-specific performance installation titled, Between Constructions of Desire, premiering April 5th and 6th at the Kenilworth Jan Serr Studio, featuring original sound composition by C. Olivia Valenza.
Between Form and Formlessness: Reimagining Architecture of Body in Space
Union Cinema
Our research project with Associate Professor Maria Gillespie focuses on the investigation of corporeality as it is experienced, perceived, and constructed in space and architecture. We are conducting movement research that questions how meaning, power, and desire are made legible and palpable when the body and its relationship to space emphatically impact each other. This project deconstructs and then reconstructs the body in space through movement that co-exists with sculpture, sonic, and spatial gestures. The potentials and limitations of architecture and material lead us to find both poetic and political resonance in the dance making and performing experience. Our research is based on two movement experiences defined by structures and sculpture, demonstrating how bodies make space. In our embodied practice, we find spatial and kinesthetic methods utilizing rope and plexiglass to create a tactile relationship between the moving body and architectural structure. Harnessed by ropes, we suspend from the ceiling and each other, finding strategies that create a freedom and virtuosity that was not possible before. This harnessed relationship to gravity provokes the compositional complexity of navigating the duality of form and formlessness and durability and impermanence. We collaborated with UWM Professor of Sculpture Glenn Williams who designed and created a seven-foot ramp made of plexiglass and steel. This sculpture both reveals and contains our bodies to forefront the desire of viewing juxtaposed with the vulnerability of performing. The ramp also shapes and expands our movement beyond quotidian use, gesturing towards human potential. Our choreographies explore the possibilities and limitations revealed when the assumption of the ephemeral body is complicated by the “permanence” of architecture. The research has manifested into a site-specific performance installation titled, Between Constructions of Desire, premiering April 5th and 6th at the Kenilworth Jan Serr Studio, featuring original sound composition by C. Olivia Valenza.
