t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s

Our participation in the Digital Artist Residency is well under way! Millicent Place has racked up hundreds of tweets now and has becomes very different from how we first intended it. Initially we were attempting to tell a story about an art gallery through the eyes of the person whose opinion matters least, the receptionist, almost as if she was an extra in a film. This would be giving a voice to a character whose purpose is to make a film more real but is in no way a main story line. We wanted it to create mystery around a space and people that were heard but never seen – the only evidence of their existence would be the content we uploaded to twitter. Since then the account has almost turned into an inner monologue about the art world and the people within it, with occasional tangents into ‘real world experiences’. But these opinions are constantly in opposition with themselves, going back and forth between liking and disliking, knowing and not knowing etc. It would be interesting to exhibit the work once it is complete, having the twitter feed displayed along side the schedule of events and then also the characters and their individual break downs. It would be like taking the back of a clock and seeing all the cogs and gears that go into making those hands spin round so effortlessly.

We went to see an incredibly impressive and bizarre dance piece by Arthur Pita, the man who has been described as the David Lynch of dance, so as you can probably imagine it was pretty special. Stepmother/Stepfather is experienced in two halves, the evening’s first half, Stepmother, deals with fairy tales from Snow White to Rumpelstiltskin via Red Riding Hood and potentially various other references we failed to recognise. They all go wrong  and these six creatures (potentially the ‘Stepmothers’) dressed in black leather do their best, and succeed, to literally tear the stories to pieces in a truly terrifying manner. There is a constant suggestion that this is possibly the nightmares of the central child who appear and reappears throughout.

During the second half we’re nudged a few years down the line when three cute little dolly girls, complete with giggles, discover the opposite sex and one of them ends up having relations with, assumedly, the Stepfather. The piece ends with the pair dancing in beyond the grave; her drowned in a well, him hung high from a tree, yet they create these beautiful, tear wrenching movements which feel far from a typically morbid finale. Somehow the dancers give validity and feelings to this constant stream of make believe doom and gloom. We’ve never seen movement tell such a vivid story.