[i asked the city to dance with me on a tuesday afternoon] by Beatrice Jarvis.
This film is an outcome of my Groundwork Residency: Tracing the Pathway at Milton Keynes Arts Center in May 2015.
The body in the city acts as vessel; to carry, contain and interact; forming routes and navigations through the immediacies of its encounter. The body in the city becomes a means to extend the discourses of the mind and architecture to a frontal physical plane. The experience of the body as it moves through its decided and undecided routes of the complex labyrinth becomes synthesis; forming in such modes of encounter a reflection as to the physical landscape it temporally habits. Exploring the passage ways of the body through the city can function as means for discourse as to the nature of affect the city may have on the psychology of urban human behaviour and simultaneously affords insight as to how the city is formed and cemented by the very patterns which human occupancy projects. This mutual dialectical relationship becomes synonymous to concepts as to how far cities are designed for people and how people essentially redesign and augment the fabric of urban texture. The embodiment of the urban experience by the human form becomes focus for this research; how far can the body enter a state of conscious reflection as to its use and positioning within the built environment to observe and how can such conscious observations be then potentially be reapplied to generate shifts in land use patterning and generate possible realms of progress within discourses of spatial planning.
My field work like approaches site as a canvas upon which numerous marks, symbols and lines have been added to; such marks and codes constitutive of some form of spatial and movement language; how can this language be transcribed, documented, recorded and then re- told using visual performance and spatial intervention. How does the site permit and enable? How do our surroundings form our codes and conducts and how might we use performance as a tool and resource to begin to understand and re-evaluate our own performance within time and space? Through the language of multi-disciplinary performance making exercises I explore how constructed narrative, historical documentation and oral histories in collaboration with movement, voice, costume and visual representation can come to represent strands of personal experience of shared heritage space.
For more information please see: http://beatricejarvis.net/2015/06/09/this-is-not-a-manifesto/
And the full catalogue is online here: http://issuu.com/urbanresearchforum/docs/final_doc_?e=3178383/13407243
Beatrice Jarvis is an urban space creative facilitator, choreographer and researcher, and founder of the Urban Research Forum and The Living Collective. As a dance artist, she works in Romania, Gaza, Berlin, Germany and Northern Ireland to generate large-scale and site specific choreographic works to explore the social power and potential of embodied movement practices.
http://beatricejarvis.net/