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00:05:30 00:05:48
Hello, I’m Sioned Huws. Let’s see. Just to give a context, and how I come to be standing here, now…
00:05:48 00:06:03
It’s through the kind invitation of Philipp Gehmacher. He invited me to be one of the ten artists to participate in the walk+talk.
00:06:03 00:06:23
But today I have to admit to you my failure in that I actually haven’t managed to achieve Philipp’s proposition. And I’m going to attempt to explain to you why.
00:06:23 00:06:35
So you can relax: this is not a performance. And feel free to say whatever you want as well.
00:06:38 00:06:52
At four o’clock today, I’ve decided that what I was doing, didn’t really say anything about how I work or what I do.
00:06:52 00:07:12
I thought like, I was just stringing movements together making a performance. And as I understand it, it wasn’t really a proposition from Philipp to create a performance.
00:07:12 00:07:35
But already to me this is proposing something, an interest that I have, the question of whether am I performing or not? But this is the performance sense that I would like to be able to achieve. The same sense…
00:07:37 00:08:03
When I was introduced to the Halle G on Thursday; it already gives me such a huge proposition. So it already says a lot about how I work, or how I begin to make work when I see a space like this.
00:08:03 00:08:18
For me it has two spaces within one. And for me they’re contradicting spaces. In a good sense.
00:08:18 00:08:28
Instantly, I’m attracted to the periphery of the room; it’s what… where my interest is.
00:08:28 00:08:44
Then you have the defined square, which for me is almost a performance. Here.
00:08:52 00:09:10
For me, what’s interesting about the 10 walk+talks is maybe not the individual, but what the 10 walk+talks would reveal about each other, what they say about each other’s work.
00:09:10 00:09:31
Meg Stuart was performing on Friday and she sat here. And she sat and she looked at this space. And she said: When I look at a space, it is never emtpy for me. It is all fragments of stories, memories, desires.
00:09:31 00:09:38
And that was such a revelation for me. I never thought that somebody looked at a space like that.
00:09:38 00:09:58
When I look at a space, I always see what is here. And in the same sense, I could put myself here, always (…) confronted with the space. This is always my starting point.
00:10:01 00:10:11
I don’t create - that’s what I do - I don’t create movement language. I make works. And each work is different.
00:10:11 00:10:25
I always come back to this point, as if I’ve been here before. That interests me also: what my material is.
00:10:29 00:10:39
So this is what this space proposes for me. I’m interested in the periphery and what’s (…).
00:11:07 00:11:10
This is my way of…
00:11:57 00:12:00
It’s only a physical distance that separates us.
00:12:26 00:12:35
I would like to think about what the actual difficulties were in working on the walk+talk, for me.
00:13:29 00:13:45
Some of your references might come also, because as soon as you start to see a periphery and a square, it becomes a (…) in your mind. Bruce Nauman has this Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square.
00:13:47 00:14:08
I was thinking about how we do reference one another here. There is a dance history (…). There are repeats going on.
00:15:38 00:15:55
(…) Why do we… Why is it one will have this things for anybody to do?
00:15:55 00:16:10
Walking through an open space. You take an open space that is totally unfamiliar to a person.
00:16:12 00:16:18
The first thing you do is walk around the periphery.
00:16:24 00:16:37
You become self-conscious of every move, every step that you take. Absorbing everything.
00:16:37 00:16:56
This self-consciousness interests me because it (…) me every day. And the every day is not about walking, it’s the time you do it in.
00:17:52 00:17:56
And my body is in the (…) direction.
00:18:22 00:18:31
When we enter into a space it is already changed.
00:18:44 00:18:47
It’s a condition of history.
00:18:56 00:19:00
But it is then a possibility to do nothing.
00:21:09 00:21:30
I was always (…) when I was training to dance, to extend from (…), but slowly I understand why this is my limit. My limit is…
00:24:45 00:24:54
I would like to give you a proposition. Would you exchange spaces with me?
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Programme note
“Talking is the reasoning of my actions in words, dancing is my understaning of an action made visible in the body. The theatre, a space to be changed by the actions of people. When we enter into a space it is already changed. It is an impossibility to do nothing, the body is alive; even the voice is an action of the body. There is no art form such as dance confronted by time, it exists in the moment, as soon as it has lived it has passed; a dance is not forever as a portrait, photo, film, sculpture can be. Choreography can be anything you or I want to be, it’s the chosen frame to present movement, whether it’s the walk of a pigeon crossing a road or an athlete in mid air, even a bouncing ball, it is a question of gravity and it affects all of us, all of the time in our daily life, dancers and non dancers alike, the body stands in the world in reltaion to other things. Movement is my passion and choreography is my understanding of this, including stillness, without stillness there would be no motion and vice versa. I am touched by the beauty, fragility and incertitude of our everyday life, a performer is a reflection of the viewer and provokes a certain curiosity about our existence, in its complexity and simplicity we share emotions. Humane grace is attributed to defying gravity. Why do we consider a body at rest (horizontal) a beautiful sight. Having a sympathy for how hard life is (vertical); all that we want to do by the end of the day is rest. We walk in order not to fall / we live in order not to die.” (Sioned Huws, March 2008)