Edge Hill University
Browse
1/2
31 files

STUCK performance photography

performance
posted on 2020-05-07, 08:39 authored by Helen NewallHelen Newall, Steve Davismoon

STUCK is a Dance Theatre installation; a collaboration between Julia Griffin (Choreographer and Live Performer), Professor Stephen Davismoon (Composer, Sound Designer and Live Sound Performer) and Professor Helen Newall (Images and Projections). It takes as its central themes for each of the authors a lamentation of the loss of memory and identity through Dementia. For each artist this work is centred upon memory and identity.

All of its sounds in the soundscape are derived from the movement of Julia's body: arms, legs, feet and hands as well as the sounds of her breathing as she moved through, often getting 'Stuck' various states. In live performance Davis follows her every movement and arc, diffusing the sound live, in a quasi-improvised way, across an array of 8 loudspeakers allowing for often granular dispersal of the sound.

The multi-layered projections by Helen Newall using text selected from Julia's account of her mother's loss of identity, bring an extraordinarily haunting perspective to the work. Using kinetic typography, the investigative aim was to find a way of visually representing the erosion of verbal language fluency and language confusion experienced by some sufferers of dementia, alongside their loss of identity and memory, and reflected Newall's own experiences of her father's aphasic dementia.


To listen to the sound as you look at the images click here: https://soundcloud.com/stephen-davismoon/stuck


More photographs of the performance at Angel Field Festival, Liverpool Hope University: https://www.flickr.com/photos/liverpoolhopeuniversity/albums/72157713091246246


'STUCK' has performed at:

- Resonant Edge Festival, and ICE Festival of Ideas, EHU, June 2017;

- for psychiatric intensive care unit staff, Callington Road Hospital, Bristol, May 2018;

- Angel Field Festival, Liverpool Hope University, February 2020.

History