Sarea Hidskes-Valora,
Sarah Miller,
Charlotte Spencer &
Ruth Varley
Soundscore composed by
Anita Mahtani
Moving Sculpture
work in progress 2005
Choreographed & Directed by
Marguerite Caruana Galizia
Performed by
Sarea Hidskes-Valora,
Sarah Miller &
Charlotte Spencer.
Soundscore composed by
Anita Mahtani
Filmed by
Rebecca Page
Moving Sculpture
work in progress 2005
Choreographed & Directed by
Marguerite Caruana Galizia
Performed by
Sarea Hidskes-Valora, Sarah Miller and Charlotte Spencer.
Soundscore composed by
Anita Mahtani
Filmed by
Rebecca Page
Research carried out at Clarence Mews, mentored by Caroline Salem with support from the Bonnie Bird Choreography Fund 2004-2005.
Resulting from my research into building a movement vocabulary, this work extended the initial interest in individual movement to the shared movement language within a group. A dancer traces lines through space, reaching to the boundaries of their kinosphere and re-collecting to their centre. The second dancer creates a spatial counterpoint to the first movement phrase whilst the third dancer completes the lines offered by the spatial orientation of the first and second dancer. In this way the movement vocabulary is echoed and diluted through the three body nucleus to create a single moving entity with a shared identity. The visual impact is an awareness of spatial trajectories rather than individual movement.
Installation performance at Clarence Mews June 2006
A dynamic system.
A constant interchanging flow of weight. Sustaining, changing, renewing.
An interrelated set of variables.
Describing spatial parameters, spatial trajectories, spatial counterpoint.
Support / competition.
An algorithm for continuity and change.
Timelessness.
Sarea Hidskes-Valora, Sarah Miller, Charlotte Spencer and Melanie Noble.
In Collaboration with
Rebecca Page (video artist)
Screened at All F(our) One, part of London Design Fesitival.
Body Chandelier is a collaboration between artist Rebecca Page and choreographer Marguerite Caruana Galizia. Following on from Moving sculpture, body chandelier aimed to develop a format for a continuous performance and attempted to represent choreography as an object placed in the exhibition space. The removal of the stage and the anonymity of the dancers is a key element in the production of the work, where bodies blossom and unfold into layered patterns of disjointed limbs and levitating appendices.
Alejandra Bano, Elizabeth Langdon Davies, Harriet Latham and Katy Pendlebury.
Performed at the Place Robin Howard Theatre in June 2008 and in Resolution! 2009
This piece aimed to convey a sense of loss and grief through its fractured aesthetic and unsettling sound score. Four dancers perform solos that collide and overlap over the course of the work. Vereno Leo’s set portrays a broken chamber highlighted by the shadowy effects of Natalie Jones’ lighting.
"all artifice and ambience, arty but stylish with it... Four diaphanously dressed dancers haunt the stage, slipping past each other like phantoms, wandering as fitfully as restless souls... skilfully choreographed, well danced, and uncannily gripping."
- Sanjoy Roy
"Lighting is a key feature of Marguerite Caruana Galizia's QUaRteT, by turns obscuring and exposing the dancers in silhouette and floodlight, emphasising the work's sense of intense disjuncture. Solos come together but never quite become duets; one half of the stage is divided from the other by a menacing line of tape; broken chairs are stacked in a corner and suspended from the ceiling; a soundtrack of foreign radio broadcasts and static is repeatedly interrupted. In a coherent and clearly envisioned work, the performers' repeated falling, turning and reaching actions suggest a frustrated desire to connect with one another. "
- Lise Smith
TriAd was a research piece that explored the relationship between real and virtual space through an integration of projection on a live relay loop with live performance.
Placing a camera and live projection within a performance space resulted in a multiplication of spaces and time frames, and a fragmentation of experience. Whilst maintaining a fairly simple use of effects, small adjustments were used in order to create differences which facilitated an interplay between the live and projected movement. Continuing my own artistic practice, TriAd displayed an interest in the geometry of the space brought about by the material and immaterial lines and patterns generated by the different elements of the work. Whilst my initial aim was to integrate the two spaces, I became interested in the decidedly A-centred nature of the piece, where the layers were never fully reconciled to each other. The incorporation of camera, lights and projector within the stage set created an interest in the operational space and a consideration of the role and positioning of operators within the piece.
Marguerite Caruana Galizia in collaboration with the dancers
Text
Emmet Williams, from Cellar Song for Five Voices
Music
Prelude 2 from Images for Piano by Howard Skempton, recording:
John Tilbury, Sony Classic Works, 1996.
Technical support
Gareth Green
Performed by
Samantha Cotton, Elodie Frati, Andrea Just-Herrozu and LauraPearson
Artistic Supervision
Matteo Fargion and Sue Maclennan
This work was developed from existing scores which are shown in fragments
throughout the work. These are: J.S. Bach’s Contrapunctus I, from the Art of the
Fugue; Arvo Part’s O Weisheit, from the Magnificent Antiphones; Emmet Williams’
Cellar Song for Five Voices; and ABC for group improvisation by Marguerite
Caruana Galizia.
Score for Four presents the dancers with four different scores which they work
through over the course of the piece. Each score contains a degree of indeterminacy
since it leaves choices open to the performers in performance. As a result the work
remains open to differences from one instantiation to the next, and the dancers are
forced to talk to each other to cue different sections.
This work was inspired by my experience of Trisha Brown’s Locus, which led
subsequently to an interest in the use of indeterminacy in musical practice and the
Fluxus score based art works. In particular I was inspired by the works of John
Cage, Earle Brown and Ken Friedman and their various writings on the notion of
indeterminacy.
Marguerite Caruana Galizia in collaboration with the dancers
Performed by
Laure Bachelot and Charlotte Ashwell
“Strange Loop” is a work in progress that follows on from my research into Impossible Spaces. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s impossible buildings, the Impossible Space uses the two dimensionality of the projected image to extend the real space and bring about relationships that would not be possible in a 3-D environment. The projected image shows an aspect of the real space, put into a configuration that reacts differently to the ways we expect. I was interested in drawing out the artistic potential of the self-reflexive situation, bending the logic of space through the intersection of different planes, like a Mobius strip that folds back on itself. The notion of a Strange Loop developed from my reading of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach: An eternal golden braid.( 1979). Hofstadter describes Escher’s ‘Ascending and Descending’ (1960) as a “Strange Loop” where “by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. “(Hofstadter, 1979). A Strange Loop contains a contradiction in itself which creates a circular reasoning, where it is impossible to determine what comes first and what comes second, because both the first and the second action rely on the second and first action (respectively) in order to exist.
The work is performed by Laure Bachelot and Charlotte Ashwell. My research was mentored by Mark Coniglio, from Troika Ranch, and Nic Sandiland. The project was made possible by a Bursary from Dance Digital and supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council England.
