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WHIP IT – a show of improvised drawing and dance
Saturday 30th August
7.30 pm SHARP
Join us for drinks and nibbles after the show.
Life and Balance Centre
132 Glebe Point Road
$10 donation
Drawings by Lisa Roberts
fab new trio “3 PART…..” mystery
and special guests Tony Osborne and Ashley Dyer
Drawing improvised moving
A note to dancers:
I was thinking, as I sorted through these drawings, that I should only show you the ones I was most pleased with. But then I thought No. What really interests me is responding immediately to how you move. I wanted to show you these drawings before the judge in me said No, you can’t do that!
You may have guessed that I have not done this before – shown all those in-between drawings that you have to do to get to the ones that just ‘work’.
So here are unedited sequences of what caught my eye as you moved.
These drawings will be made into animations that depict human presence in landscapes. I don’t know exactly how these will turn out. Like you, I am improvising. But I do have a structure to work with. It is based on the cycles of motion of the earth around the sun. These are some of the natural cycles that regulate climate change.
I love watching you move so in tune to yourselves, to each other and to us as we observe you. I love how you move as if no line exists between yourselves and your environment. Oh, if we could all be like that, what a wonderful world it would be.
Thank you.
And thanks to Catherine Magill for making this happen.
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Rhapsodic MOOD-O-GRAPH
[picture to come]
This evening I saw an extraordinary thing – a mood-o-graph. It was part of an installation by year 12 student, Samuel Heath, exhibited at Sydney Technical High School. He wrote:
My artwork attempts to express musical composition in visual form and challenge traditional conceptual boundaries between these artforms, through my personal interpretations of George Gershwin’s Rhapsoody in Blue, 1924.
Listening to this jazz concerto I was so moved I found myself spontaneously drawing lines in response to pitch, volume, rhythm and melody. These became more structured linear forms, which I called “The Mood-o-graph”. This was then transformed into 3D landscapes of layered mountboard, cut to represent , through positive and negative space and reflected colour, my response to each of the musical parts, inspired by aertist, Lee Bethel. Inspired by early abstract artists, Kandinsky and De Maistre, who experimented with music as art, my four pastel panels capture colours, textures, harmonies and forms from four major part of the piece: 1) The Main theme, 2) The Piano cadenza, 3) The Slow Theme and 4) The Climax, to reflect the vibrant harmonies and lyrical melodies in each part. The compositional structure of the pastel works as parallelograms hung at various heights, and divided by barline-like poles, suggests the rhapsodic shape and power of the piece as it builds into its clashing climax. (Artist statement, Programme notes)
Looking through the visual diary accompanying the installation I was taken by the original lines, improvised in kinesthetic response to hearing the music. The freshness of the drawn lines has been maintained in the final work, through its carefully conceived and crafted structure. “Rhapsody in Blue”, the installation, is a conceptual and physical embodiment of ideas and emotions developed from an immediate response to music. Developing a sustained work from an improvised moment, whilst maintaining a sense of that moment, is an enormous achievement. So why develop those first drawings, that are wonderful as they are? In the final work layers of meaning are embedded in a structure of archetypal forms. These forms trigger thoughts for me of other sounds, and internal landscapes. I saw in the lines of the mood-o-graph skylines of Antarctica. I saw in the mirroring of forms the north and south poles meeting. I read into the structure a kind of synthesis between through and feeling – between art and science.