Carol Brown Dances: Choreographic History

Choreographic History


Photos by Mattias Ek

performances to date
press quotes
reviews

4 HOUR INSTALLATION PERFORMANCE

created by visual artist ESTHER ROLINSON
and choreographer CAROL BROWN
PREMIERED December 1998

shelf life is an installation of new technologies involving collaborations between established artists from digital art (Esther Rolinson), architecture (Stewart Dodd), sound design (Russell Scoones) and choreography (Carol Brown).

In a gallery space, within which an outsized glass shelf suspends, a figure
exists in a mutating digital environment.
Her feet cannot touch the ground.
She is a live-in artefact, hovering in time & space, at the threshold of growth and decay.

shelf life lasts 4 hours each day. Gallery visitors come, stay and leave at their leisure. Comments from recent exhibitions included, "Mesmerizing - and original", "A real experience", and "A piece of depth and quality - I must see it again."

shelf life appeared in Romaeuropa, Roma (20-22 October 2000) and 4+4 Days in Motion International Theatre Festival, (9 Nov 2000).

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Performances to date:

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea
North Gallery, Brighton
Horsham Arts Centre
Surrey Institute of Art & Design, Farnham
Poole Arts Centre
Playhouse Theatre, Newcastle
St Pancras Churchyard, Spring Loaded Festival, London
Romaeuropa, Teatro Nazionale, Roma, Italy.
Holsovice Brewery. 4 + 4 Days in Motion, International Theater Festival

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Press quotes:

"The neatest possible justification for live art - life, simply, turning into art." The Guardian

"There is an aura of serenity from the shelf, as though it were resting in the eye of a storm, a haven from the chaotic world beyond it...the audience are mesmerized."
Live Art Magazine

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Reviews:

A meditation on glazing

The Guardian Friday June 2 2000
St Pancras Church, London
By Judith Mackrell

A glass shelf is currently suspended 3 meters above the ground via an elegant construction of chrome stilts, and for three-and-a-half hours each evening, dancer and choreographer Carol Brown is performing her solo Shelf Life.

The installation was created with visual artist Esther Rolinson and began as a dialogue between movement and architecture. But the project evolved a further cluster of metaphors - of things being left on shelves, of the slow, inexorable process of age and decay - and these are now a central part of the performance.

Brown is an assertive, even glamorous, performer, confidently angling her strong body through different planes and levels as she works within the limits of her stage. But she also operates from an unusually calm focus, so even as we register the ambitious structures of her choreography we're also caught by the sense of the slow, steady heartbeat grounding all her moves. As traffic noise snarled up with the serene washes of Russell Skoon's sound score, it was as if we could hear the sound of two conflicting human rhythms - the ragged palpitations of city life and the internal pulse dramatised by Brown's body. As ordinary people were briefly snagged into watching the show - passing by on buses or looking down from offices - Brown's meditative dance, isolated on her shelf, seemed an icon of contemplation, a little monto mori. It was the neatest justification of live art - life, simply, being turned into art.

Live Art Magazine May 1999.
By Josephine Leask.

A body on a glass shelf, slides, melts, subsides, re-emerges, crawls, rises to the vertical, then pours down through space. Carol Brown, somewhere between virtual body and live presence is activator of this installation with its ambient environment created by digital imaging and soundscore. She plays with the notion of being 'on the shelf', with its connotations of waiting, and being past the sell by date. The soft malleable surfaces of her body merge with the hard smooth glass surface, while projected digital figures, created by Esther Rolinson move as virtual bodies, shadowy extensions of Brown - what we see is a dance of intermingling live and virtual presences. For a duration of four hours she departs but never arrives, in a series of constant becomings. Suspended in space her substantial body and its fleeting presences draw attention to the architecture of the space. There is an aura of serenity from the shelf, as though it were resting in the eye of a storm, a haven from the chaotic world beyond it.

The audience who inhabit the installation are lulled and mesmerized, some sit or lie on the floor, some sleep caccooned from the outside world, guided towards the virtual world by this reassuring material body.

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