I’ve been oh so lucky over these past few months, working with good people, making new things, hoping for and aiming for change and better, new, ways for us all
Being invited into the Visual Arts world has been a particular unexpected gifting. Recontextualising what I do, and sometimes take for granted, for different kinds of spaces and places and people. Breaking out of and away from more familiar forms of presenting and sharing work, has not only re-surfaced forgotten powers that bodies and their movements hold, but also led me to new discoveries, possibilities and potentials. I’ve been re-invigorated into a new certainty of how important it is that we have the opportunity to know ourselves in body, personally and socially and politically.
I’ve had a longing for this. I can highly recommend putting the familiar into unfamiliar places.
To Avoid Falling Apart
Currently touring with the Travelling Gallery is TO AVOID FALLING APART a commission in collaboration with artist Emmie McLuskey.
I love this work, loved making it and love that it is being shared in many and varied nooks and crannies and unexpected places along Scotland’s East coast. Art is taken to people on a bus, a bus that’s been travelling the length and breadth of Scotland since 1978. What a good thing. And for a similar 40+ years, since I was a student in the late 70’s, I’ve been teaching and sharing a way of moving that is fundamental to my practice – the finding of the reciprocal act of counterbalance, a weight bearing and weight sharing, between two or more people. This is movement that belongs to us all, its significance has been renewed, and how it speaks to the politics of today is profound.
Here’s a wee bit from the Travelling Gallery website:
“Both artists share an interest in how we live together, how we experience our moving bodies in society and how we communicate outside of spoken words, honouring the body as both the root of experience and as a potential route to change. The politics of support are intertwined in the actions and the artwork and through the work they question how we are allowed to move, what and whose movement it is we value and where the body and its movement are placed in the hierarchy of Western cultural norms.
You can read more about it here.
Weathering Well
In February I was invited to contribute to the WEATHERING WELL course unit with students of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape on relationships between body and buildings
“Body / Movement workshop led by choreographer, Janice Parker, considering tectonic expressions of support, touch, rhythm, balance, poise, ground, tension.”
A small part in a much bigger field of study but an exciting one that drew parallels between the weathering of buildings and human ageing. It felt deeply relevant to bring students into a direct experience of their body and its movement and to invite them to consider their physical selves as a fundamental knowledge base that is in a constant reciprocal relationship with landscape, the built environment and the materiality of things. Thanks to Fiona McLachlan for the invitation.
Not Brittle, Not Rigid, Not Fixed
My 2022 Edinburgh Art Festival commission NOT BRITTLE, NOT RIGID, NOT FIXED which was part of the Channels programme now has an accompanying publication. As part of the live work I invited three witnesses – landscape architect Suzanne Ewing, and visual artists Audrey Grant, and Mathew Arthur Williams – to accompany me on different days over the two weeks in August that I created the work. The publication is their response, along with a fore-word by long-term collaborator, and Channels commissioning artist, Emmie McLuskey.
Inspired by the thinking and writing of Sociologist Richard Sennett Not Brittle, Not Rigid, Not Fixed is an exploration of the dialogue and reciprocity existing between the body and its movement, the spaces and places we build and how we live there. For me Sennett speaks directly to the politics of the body and things that I hold dear – how and where are we are allowed to move, how do we know ourselves in body, what movement do we value, what if our movement practice was free of the marketplace, what if we were opportunist movers, and how do we know a place and feel that we belong?
This is just the start of something
You can find out about it here.
A small part in a much bigger field of study but an exciting one that drew parallels between the weathering of buildings and human ageing. It felt deeply relevant to bring students into a direct experience of their body and its movement and to invite them to consider their physical selves as a fundamental knowledge base that is in a constant reciprocal relationship with landscape, the built environment and the materiality of things. Thanks to Fiona McLachlan for the invitation.
Castle Lennox
And in Theatre land I was movement director on CASTLE LENNOX with Lung Ha’s Theatre Company. A superb work written by Linda McLean based on her experience of visiting her Uncle in the 60’s in Lennox castle Hospital, Scotland’s largest institution for learning disabled people. An important powerful story that needs to be heard and the power and politics of it being told by a company of disabled actors. The sell-out run is over now, the four and five star reviews are in, and Castle Lennox needs to be see again.
A collaboration with Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre.
A small part in a much bigger field of study but an exciting one that drew parallels between the weathering of buildings and human ageing. It felt deeply relevant to bring students into a direct experience of their body and its movement and to invite them to consider their physical selves as a fundamental knowledge base that is in a constant reciprocal relationship with landscape, the built environment and the materiality of things. Thanks to Fiona McLachlan for the invitation.
The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart
And finally, THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENTIA HART is currently playing in The McKittrick Hotel in New York city following a tour in the States.
I love this work and have been movement director with it since it began in 2010, this time shared with the brilliant Jack Webb. It’s a show that just keeps on giving. If you haven’t already I hope you get to see it sometime.
Enjoy Spring everyone, a waking up from needed slumber and fallow time, of growth that’s bursting into bloom
Janice