ON MAKING ART WITH DANCERS

By Amanda Humphries, August 2014

We are working together again to present work alongside the Australian Premiere of the dance film ‘Meeting Places’ in November as part of the Fremantle Festival 2014. The idea of ‘meeting places’ is the point of departure upon which to muse and play with ideas that have been born out of the heavily involved multi-layered, multi-disciplinary project in Myanmar.

I am responding this time by taking a small abstract from our collaborative project and developing it; exploring in rather than out. The work intends to look at the point of connection in isolation from all the content:  simply looking at the surfaces between things. I am reflecting upon concepts within performances: ‘Back to Front’, ‘Perspectives’ and the dance film, ‘Meeting Places’ by Remnant Dance and the children from the AYDC, on the fine paper cut out works in the River Gallery II in Yangon, in the way some Myanmar artists painted faces.

I have decided to work large and figuratively to complement the dancers and the magnitude of their energy and presence. The work I made in Myanmar was a timid place at the edge of my retina and the landscapes outside: small and quiet portals to unknown subjects.

Meeting places, dissolving lines – between, inside. Maybe resisting, creating surfaces or barriers, enclosed spaces and worlds, releasing, extending, pouring and building, embroidering slowly, delicately building in the space between, together. Disappearing, overlaying, fading, flooding, saturating, opaque. Hiding spaces, exposed spaces, rhythm, repetition, synchronization of particles, patterns forming. Together, amongst, what is missing.  Enclosed, ambiguity between inside and outside.

I think about how some sea creatures create their shells from the inside out, secreting a material that gradually calcifies around itself. Humans create it from the outside in, a timber hut, a burrowed cave, a smile.

The first point of entry into my work is the processes used, and sometimes the nature of the materials is the only thing I am sure of in making art work.  I am scared of context and form, almost like a commitment creates a barrier, or sureness. I am never sure, but always compelled, if that makes sense. I also like empty spaces, compositions become heavy and light, or invisible or loud, or the relationship between contrary elements. Working with dancers, the body is a second point of entry to my works. For me the body is a common reference point through which it is possible to engage the viewer more directly.It allows a platform to explore the meeting place more directly.

Watching dancers, is it possible that they have kind of escaped representation, dissolved the line between concept and experience? They seem to embody what they represent in the immediacy of work being performed. It is not detached, distant. In art sometimes space helps to elude that barrier between audience and piece. Spatial arrangements, installations, atmosphere to emulate something, painting becomes compressed - that layer of distance and stillness. I can only illustrate what in dance can be created.

I am not so sure where I fit personally.  Naturally I gravitate toward the inside of something hiding and looking out; reveling in the infinite space within a shell, the room for cosmos when there is no context, no form. I love this space.  Then there is something sort of strangely intimate about the cosmos, of infinite space, it is an interconnection of everything, formless. So maybe there is potential to be contrary inside a shell, to connect by going in to go out. 

Images:

Above: Remnant Dancers and children on set filming ‘Meeting Places’ at the Nagar Glass Factory in Yangon Myanmar

Top(L-R):1. Amanda stitching backdrop at River Gallery Yangon; 2. Paper cut out composition work in progress (detail) 3. composition workings for a new painting (Remnant dancers Caroline, Katie and Stephanie); 4. ‘Glass Mountain 1’; 5.Katie and Esther performing at AYDC, Myanmar; 6.Process picture of making the glass chairs; 7. Glass vessel installed at AYDC previously exhibited at River Gallery II in Yangon.