As way of a post-script, the PhD thesis presents a discussion about two of my unpublished and unfinished film-sketches; (Dances with) Cloud, Gate and Tree and Sketches in Reel Time. These two films represent my ‘thinking quickly’ and ‘sketching with a camera’ as a way of catching ideas that emerged as a poetic by-product of my on-going site-situated research.

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In the films I frame interior/exterior landscape dialogues within an aesthetic system constructed through stop frame animation employed to capture body-place correspondences. As in other works in the portfolio, the practice was informed by the definitions of space and place articulated by spatial theorists and geographers that I explore choreographically in order to better understand the role and expressive potential of exterior landscapes in practice.

 

(Dances with) Cloud, Gate and Tree was performed by myself and filmed using a phone camera during the 2020 lockdown in a site in the South Downs National Park, Sussex, UK. As a starting point for the film, I considered how I might approach body-site relationships so that human subjectivity and the dynamics found in and inherent to a space, were bought into a reciprocal and coequal relationship. This enquiry was informed by Massey’s, proposal that space is the ‘product of interrelations’, constantly and temporarily forming and changing in relation to multiple perspectives that emerge as co-incidental, coequal events (2005:9). Put simply, I wanted to investigate how Massey’s ideas might be employed choreographically and I also revisited Ingold’s notion of correspondences (2013) as a way of working in accordance with the specific and essential qualities of materials to precipitate a joining with the movement of things (2013:12). This was achieved through the use of the cameras stop frame animation mode, combined with the slowing down of the dancers’ movements employed to emphasise the dynamic quality of things moving in the environment so that the viewer of the resulting films sees the environment as animated and the human as moving at normal speed. Thus, correspondences were established that bring the dancers’ physicality into dialogue with the site so that the dynamics and expressive qualities of both is revealed.

 

In Sketches in Reel Time the dancer Marina Collard moves in relation to a wash basin in the MACRO museum, Rome. The sink is designed for the women’s toilets and is a rectangular form mounted by a white plastic ‘landscape’ of soft, sensual curves and pools where water  that is released from an automated fountain, trickles and gathers. Also built into the sink is an air dryer, soap dispenser and a red light that are automated to spout, blow, and light up in response to movement. The design of the sink; with its pale pink colour, smooth curves and spouting water fountain, is highly kitsch in its reference to female sensuality and seems perfectly in place in the city that is also home to the Trevi fountain and St Peter’s Basilica (I noted that the men’s sink was a plain, stainless steel cube).​

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