THE DANCING (2018)

During my time working with Company Three, a contemporary theatre company based in Islington, North London, we would often use bizarre exercises to generate work and ideas. When I first stared developing The Dancing I borrowed an exercise that was a particular favourite of mine: to sing along to a song on noise cancelling headphones as loud as possible… with very embarrassing results.

Listening to the audio in this piece you’d never guess that it had originally been a recording of me singing Mozart’s ‘Serenade in B flat’. I extracted, repeated and looped the densest, most surreal fragments of audio to create the strange sounds that accompany the dancers. I’d originally wanted to pair the footage with the audio of me singing the entire serenade out of tune, but the dream-like video needed a sound that was as incoherent and unsettled as the dancing (made up of country dance tutorial clips I had found on YouTube).

I presented the piece on two old-style monitors stacked on top of one another, but extended the footage on screen by a second, so that with each repeated loop the audio and video would slowly diverge. I did the same with the bottom screen so that the dancers would become more out of time with each other with every loop of the film.