Image Credit: Alecia Neo
Timed as 4 solos danced in loops (each loop= 45-50 minutes), Body without Location, is an attempt at constructing a durational dance installation comprising the yarn and the moving body. The 4 solos, namely, String Through, Sitting/Spinning, Projectile, and Hopscotch, emerge from embodied ways of conceiving rhythmic connections between qualities of a yarn and vocabularies of a dancing body. String Through tests the engagement of the body with the yarn in its form of a mesh, Sitting/Spinning studies repetition and notation embedded in crochet knitting, and Projectile and Hopscotch mobilise the yarn as a ground of play. The work intends to create a space where the choreographic agency is parted between the dancing body and the yarn, and the audience too is invited to draw (using paper and pencil) the dance in the act of watching, so as to enhance their engagement from being mere spectators to notation makers. Treating dance and choreography as its key inquiries, the work employs the yarn as an entry-point into those inquiries, in that, a source that connects the cyclical and spinal thinking that are common to both dancing and weaving. More importantly, the yarn is imagined to be producing for the moving body a spatial texture, and by way of that, a sense of place and memory which the body otherwise fails to find in a lonesome black box.
Choreography and Performance: Meghna Bhardwaj
Sound Design: Marcel Zaes
Performed as part of Meghna`s exhibition and artistic research titled Yarning,
Supported by and Premiered at Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency,
Esplanade-Theatres on the Bay, Singapore.
Year of Premiere: 2022
Documentation: Alecia Neo