This animation was constructed using a simplified form of the the Milankovitch cycles as its rhythmic structure.
Listening to paleoecologist Dominic Hodgson, talking in Cambridge last month, I learn about the Milancovitch cycles. These are the natural cycles of Earth’s motion that determine glacial and interglacial eras. Layer upon layer of data trapped in ice and sediments over these times, show evidence that humankind are tipping the natural balance.
Animating to these rhythms, I begin to connect with these cycles of change. Drawings of dancers were made at the Siobhan Davies studios London, April 2008. Animating their swinging gestures embodies something of my understanding what the scientist describes. The circle changes colour to the rhythm of one of three cycles, that together determine the natural changes on Earth. It swings between yellow and blue: warm and cold.
I had been to a studio in Sydney last Saturday, trying out some moves in response to Don’s voice. I found myself quite simply swinging, moving to the sound and meaning of the words simultaneously. The swinging motion of the pencil was suggested by the memory of having moved the very gestures I had drawn in a London studio. The day before I had danced, and the following day I drew the same moves. Over two hours of drawing, the drawings embodied the rhythms I’d moved.
This is a new beginning, working to this rhythm. Within this structure, layer upon layer of meanings can be found, through moving and drawing.
In a meeting I had with her in London last month, Siobhan Davies advised from a choreographic perspective:
… be clear about a rhythm is an incredibly good discipline. To be clear about certain timings gives you a structure and a discipline, so you don’t wander off and make phrase after phrase after phrase after phrase…
Give yourself a discipline. Say OK I’m going to do something for a certain amount of time. And make the time very short. And then do it a certain amount of time again on the score. So the score gives you timing, imaginative idea, geographic idea. And then, get on with it.
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Watching the documentary, Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica, on ABC television tonight, was another way to viscerally connect with Antarctica. Though recent re-enactments, and original film of Mawson’s fateful 1912 expedition, a physical experience of the landscape changes was experienced. Changes in the weather, and of people’s moods and fortunes, took me there quite physically. It literally fleshed out my reading of Mawson.
The Douglas Mawson Antarctic expedition of 1912 is one of the most amazing feats of physical and mental endurance of all time.
After an horrific journey across hundreds of kilometres of frozen wasteland, during which his two companions perished, the world was amazed to hear that Douglas Mawson had survived. Some questioned how it was possible, and the media of the day reported that he’d considered eating the body of his dead comrade, Xavier Mertz.
Mawson was later knighted and became a hero, but the question of how he lived when others died has tantalised scientists, historians and explorers ever since. Now, Australian adventurer Tim Jarvis retraces Mawson’s gruelling experience to find an answer. Having been almost killed during his own solo trek to the South Pole in 1999, he confronts the deadly ice again – as Mawson did, with similar meagre rations and primitive clothing and equipment.
It’s a bold and unprecedented historical experiment that will provide clues to what happened to Mawson physically – and mentally – as a man hanging on the precipice of life and death. Combining the drama of Jarvis’s contemporary adventure with chilling dramatic reconstructions, expert commentary and stunning footage from the original expedition photographed by Frank Hurley, this is an extraordinary story of human survival.
Mawson: Life And Death In Antarctica
7:30pm Sunday, 11 May 2008 Documentary CC PG
ABC 1 on-line
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Reading what Argentinian scientist Rodolfo del Valle told fellow Argentinian, artist Andrea Juan, about human interference in natural oscillations, I find a potent metaphor to animate:
…For this process we could make an analogy with the father who swings his child in a park hammock. He swings the kind cyclically, with a certain rhythm, not at random – otherwise, the hammock would twist, the child would fall…and the game would be over.
I believe there’s more and more evidence that we are “twisting the chain of the hammock”.
We are additively interfering in the natural oscillation of the cycle of carbon; there’s anthropic evidence, one produced by man; an interference which is positive, additive, and adds to the rise-fall oscillation. Through the increase of the greenhouse gas effect gases, we are causing the temperature to rise too much and just in the middle of a rising cycle – this might break the cycle. I believe this additive interference is already dangerous. Nature might be unable to restore the balance.
Interview between del Valle and Juan on board the icebreaker ARA Almirante Irizar during the summer campaign, February 2005.
Catalogue, Andrew Juan: antarctic project
Buenos Aires 2006