As part of this year’s Architecture Fringe which had RECIPROCITY as its theme and enquiry, Janice and long-term collaborator Emmie McLuskey created a new iteration of their work focusing on the movement of counterbalance.

Janice also created work with performer Sean McGarvie and Glasgow’s iconic band BrassAye, performing at the opening night of Architecture Fringe at the Briggait in Glasgow

More information on Architecture Fringe.

From the Architecture Fringe brochure

COUNTERBALANCE is RECIPROCITY in action.

When two or more people engage physically in the act of counterbalance they are giving and receiving, holding and being held, in a constant dialogue of exchange, cooperation, negotiation and support. They are literally holding each other up Counterbalancing is a functional movement action where two human bodies lean against or away from each other in a process of active and dynamic physical listening to find moments of shared suspension, balance and repose; each person adjusting to small shifts in weight, balance, musculature and skeletal structure as they unfold between them.

This is not a metaphor for reciprocity but a direct experiential embodiment of it.

A biological physiological innate intelligence taking us beyond representation or conceptualisation, words or thoughts, to felt, real-time, lived experience – a foundational knowing in our bones and our being.
This is a quiet space inviting you to sit with and experience counterbalance in words and film.

A looped silent film of five movement studies inviting the viewer to witness bodies viscerally searching for and finding the points of counter balance between them. The filming was led by the movement in an hour-long workshop, with the different cameras capturing live, unrehearsed duets, experimenting with ways images can be created intimately, and felt through the lens. The camera operators move with, under, over and among the performers.

Accompanying the films is a collection of handwritten texts created in response to the films, the workshop and to the wider propositions contained in the movement of counterbalance
Dance Artist Janice Parker will occasionally inhabit the work quietly offering the opportunity to share in a moment of counterbalance

This is part of Janice Parker and Emmie McLuskey’s ongoing collaborative work which focuses on the politics of movement and the body, where and how we are allowed to move, the inter-relationship between body, space and design, the movements we value over other movement, and the commodification and regulation of movement that is rightfully ours.

Image credit: Architecture Fringe