Carol Brown Dances: Choreographic History

Choreographic History

Architecture meets Choreography in an urban
shock-wave installation.

Photo by Mattias Ek

In the shadow of the living light a man lies sleeping and a woman's voice is seen speaking. Her body rides the surfaces of the city, detailing night visions of sensual unrest. Stirring him from his stupor, they engage in a series of increasingly complex and risky exchanges; the city becoming them, as they swerve and collide, grazed and consumed.

Bristling with friction on a narrow, undulating road and beneath a canopy of mesh, Nerve confronts issues of urban habitation: the rub of the city and the tailoring of bodies to the contours of the metropolis.

Conceived and designed by Carol Brown in collaboration with architect Stewart Dodd of Satellite Design, composer Russell Scoones and lighting designer Michael Mannion, Nerve is part of Carol's research into the architecture of movement. The piece was originally created with the assistance of a Jerwood Award in Choreography and has now been developed with the support of London Arts and Carol Brown's AHRB Research Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts.

Nerve is performed by Carol Brown and Grant Maclay.

Specifications:
Nerve is a self-contained installation work and is 12m x 3m. It is suited to large open studio settings or galleries (minimum dimension 12m x 12m) within which an audience can walk around. Minimum 6m height.

THE IDEA OF SEA
A film by Carol Brown and Tobin Rothlein. Made in Philadelphia (2001). A woman's nocturnal journey from the belly of the city to the sea.
14 minutes

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Review

By Jeremy Wood, Blueprint Magazine
(unpublished)

On my way to the performance a phrase came into my head - Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

How to navigate this dangerous territory without falling into overblown claims or parody? Nerve has developed as a collaborative dialogue between choreographer Carol Brown and architect Stewart Dodd. Starting with the notion of compression, they have developed choreography and spacial devices that uses an economy of means to explore the tense relationship of body to space in an urban environment.

An asphalt road that diagonally spans the space has been compressed into an undulating surface that problematises the traditional assumption of a flat ground on which to perform, and this is mirrored by a mesh canopy which circumscribes the upper reaches of the body. This architectural matrix encapsulates the dynamic of a restrictive urban environment in whose narrow confines the performer must negotiate the scope of potential movements and body relationships.

The performance opens with a startling and memorable passage as she moves the dead weight of his corpse along a road surface with the intensity of a forensic examination. The performers travel along the road constantly interrupted and disconcerted by its uneven surface trying to find points of mutual equilibrium.

The surface is punctuated by up-lit slits implying an illusion of depth beneath the road as if this were one of many such layers on which identical performances were taking place. These fissures are simultaneously down-lit so that the performers bodies are trapped and traversed by these shafts of light. The theme of compression is further activated by the sound score where location recordings from various urban sites have been blended and manipulated into a wall of sound. Taken together these elements form the template for a performance installation that has been designed to travel and adapt itself to other sites and perhaps, other cities.

shelf life - Photo by Mattias Ek
Photo by Mattias Ek

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