Force
Three channel film projection
Force is a series of short ‘self defence’ dance films where movements slowly disintegrate into a fast flowing dance piece. It is unclear whether the postures are aggressive or defensive.
Dancers respond to archive and contemporary military promotion advertisements, in which soldiers are instructed in how to attack and defend. The films contained slowed and broken down imagery, with instructions such as ‘chin jab’, ‘arm lock’. Performers enact aggressive and defensive postures adopting a blend of sharply punctuated and flowing, slowed down movements that contain elements of of strength, force and precision. There is a variation of pace, speed and time. The dancers perform directly to camera, with variations in full frame and close up and there is a variation in speed time and pace.
The sequence speeds up until the instructions start to disintegrate and the movements become either flowing and repetitive or broken and disjointed. A sense the body coming in and out of focus, leaving and re-entering the frame and movements becoming imperceptible to the eye. In a similar way roles of attack and defence become increasingly unstable.
Force is curated as a multi channel installation. The sound is minimal but repeated rhythm created from the natural sounds of breath and footfall and auditory utterances of force and exertion within the studio environment.
This installation responds to themes discussed in Simone Weil’s 1941 essay The Iliad or Poem of Force using gesture, repetition and cyclical movements. In her critique of violence after the fall of France in 1940, the religious and cultural theorist Simone Weil’s essay described violence in terms of a force, ‘that x that turns the body into a thing’. For Weil, force is unequivocal and indiscriminate in its impact on the body; it ultimately obliterates all who are touched by it. Each dance piece combines imagery appropriated from US Army defensive combat training films, contemporary British military recruitment films and observational documentary formats. which describe the impact of force on both bodies of aggressor and conquered.
Chancery against low frontal attack
