Christine McMillan moves in response to words from Jack Ward’s 1966 Mawson diary, read by Yoris Everaerts:
02.05.1955 /
shadowsThe cold transparent blue of the ice plateau
has become a softer blue opalescence.
Clefts and hollows in the ice cliffs have lost the glowing almost radiant blueness
and become dark shadows.
.
These simulations of Theo Jansen’s mechanical animal movements might interest you. They are so like your figures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CufN43By79s
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GgOn66knqA
cold stiller
angular inside
yet hollows rounded as voice
draw with body
see far the plateau
sun changes
cold transparent blue
soft opalescence
lost radiance
colder stiller
Dickson
Christine writes:
Moving to the words read out deepened my sense of being in the place described.
Moving with Christine, I became aware that we made similar gestural responses to some of the same spoken words. For example, when moving to the word ‘lost’, I found us both reaching out with arms and eyes, and slowing to a soft stillness. It made me think that there are certain learned gestures that have become a shared vocabulary.
Someone reminded me today about Rosalind Crisp’s movement improvization, in which she deliberately subverts anything she does that seems habitual.
Does a recognizable response necessarily signal a cliche?
Or is this only when it feels like one?
It can simply be a clearly phrased communication.