I was super excited when I received the commission to engage with people visiting the beautiful Amazing Women exhibition here at the City Arcade in Coventry. Throughout my practice, I have always used my body and movement as a language and tool to explore different themes. That meant that when I started thinking about this commission I knew straight away I wanted to use these skills on this project too.
Music holds such meaning in my practice, I knew I wanted to create a piece that incorporated both music and movement whilst looking at female bodies and their relationship to architecture in Cov, specifically the City Arcade. So much can be said through movement and so much can be explored, the beauty of movement to transcend language and cultural barriers has always fascinated me. I use movement every day to explore and express my feelings and my energy. In this project, I want movement to unlock barriers between the female body and audiences, allowing them to only see the body in its physical form that the performers want them to see it in.
I began to realise that I needed to get some bodies around me to help my vision come to life. It was super exciting for me to then find and engage a set of she/her identifying students from Warwick University to join me on this journey. I realised that students make up such a huge part of our community here in Coventry, I really wanted to understand how they behaved and connected to the city.
As I'm writing this blog, I'm currently rehearsing with this group of women to realise the movements that we will create in the final filmed piece! It's soooo exciting, and we are currently looking at how our bodies can alter through place and space. I have also been super lucky to work with two talented musicians, Louisa Alcock and Lucy Roadknight. Together, we spent two weeks composing and creating a new piece of music to accompany the movement piece. The sound of the violin has always fascinated me, the instrument can sound so beautiful and melodic whilst also sounding squeaky and sharp. I thought this contrast complimented the movement beautifully as we touched on topics around femininity, womanhood and the way the female body is meant to look, dress and move in comparison to how we wanted to portray ourselves.
The piece that we have created certainly creates tension and suspense. I really want audiences to question what it is they are really seeing and the composition will ask them to sharpen their senses. It was soooo fun to co-create this piece, we even got the chance to head down to The Belgrade to record it in a sound studio! Shout out to The Belgrade for letting us do this.
The audio is really allowing me to interrogate what each movement means, there is definitely a sense that we want to play with re-claiming the space and creating our own image. I can't wait to update you on how the rehearsals go!!!!!
Peace x
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