Siobhan Davies (SD): You'd see someone who has been at work for over forty years. I am enjoying all the experiences which have helped me get this far, but I went through a period of time when I felt that I needed to dissolve them all and not let the new work be weighed down by the previous works' failings! However, now I enjoy the remembering and seeing all the long threads and the stuff that thrived from work to work. Then (and now) I wanted to find out how to work and make with other people, and dance has been the medium that I find continually beguiling. I enjoy the doing of dance and the thinking within and around it. Dance, and all that it relates to, has become the mulch I can now draw down from.Initially I made work for theatres and also worked with the traditional but formidable companions to dance, design and music. As a young maker, I was conscious how strongly these two companion arts could shape my work, but over time I felt as if all the fine detail, the nuanced behaviors that can be revealed by people moving, were swamped by the customary forms put in place to support dance making. I wondered what would happen if I dismantled those relationships, or if I let a performance of
In Part 2 of the conversation, Siobhan Davies and David Hinton reflect on the extensive work that informed the first proposal for the film. Key compositional elements are discussed such as the representation of the protagonist through a variety of images from different sources, the decision to represent both the inner and the external world of the protagonist, and, drawing on Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography, the decision to work with minutely choreographed image sequences that are composed from archive material. The conversation explores the forensic work with visual details and the intent to draw the viewer's attention to the richness of the found film frames. Davies and Hinton also reflect on the use of damage and decay in Chu-Li Shewring's soundscapes and the roles of film editors Danny McGuire and Matthew Killip. Keywords:All This Can Happen, Portraits, noticing, protagonist, narrative, Muybridge, Marey, Stanley Spencer, Walser, dance, dance film, walking, sculpting, found image, still image, collage, sound Claudia Kappenberg (CK): We are now looking at the time before you made All This Can Happen (ATCH).1 When I read the proposal for the BFI, I was amazed as to how accurate it was and how closely it envisaged the film.2 I was wondering how much and what kind of work you did even before writing the proposal. Could you talk a bit about that?David Hinton (DH): We worked very hard on the BFI proposal. When Sue and I collaborate, we are quite likely to start from an intuition, but the minute we start to prod at that intuition, all kinds of questions come up. We then try to go one by one and answer all the questions in advance: if we want to do this, we will have to do that, and so on. So you end up having to think your way through the whole process. You start to see all the problems and decisions that are lying ahead, along the road. I suppose I have made so many films now that I can usually see what is going to be difficult.
The Running Tongue is a new film installation work by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton. It features a woman-Helka Kaski-running continuously and then appearing or jumpcutting into different and very brief scenes-or "visions"-that have been developed with Davies and Hinton by more than 20 independent dance artists in the UK. Such a large-scale collaboration resulted in a complex series of negotiations between the artists. In this interview, Davies and Hinton discuss The Running Tongue with IJSD coeditor-and one of the artists involved in the project-Simon Ellis.Simon Ellis-Can you talk about how The Running Tongue started?Siobhan Davies-David and I have known each other for thirty years and have always wanted to work together. We made All This Can Happen in 2012.1 And after that we both wanted to work together again and an opportunity to make this second piece arrived. All This Can Happen was made by a very few people and made in this same meeting room. 2 It was an intense experience, we made the work using only found footage of film and photographs many from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. This meant an enormous amount of research-which was an unknown excitement for me-to explore the past in images. Later we worked on the careful editing and juxtaposition of all the materials. We built up such a thickness of concentration in this room, it was a hermetic experience and, while I always thought of my contribution as a choreographic one, I had not worked with any dance artists for those nine months. I had missed those exchanges with dance artists so when we began to think of this new project we both wanted to work with more people, to have more traffic in this room.SE-So you're saying that one of the starting points for The Running Tongue was that if only three of you were in this room for All This Can Happen, then how do you somehow crack it open a little bit or provide access to other people?SD-Yes and be in conversation. Little did we know how much conversation it was going to be! We were intrigued to ask movement based artists to use their own practice and with that make a still screen image.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 11 Mar 2015 21:47:10 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Book Reviews Book Reviews memory and the mastery of perfect self-control. The period of Japanese occupation does not seem to have had any impact worth mentioning among storytellers. They are more articulate about the times of official interference (pp. 133 ff.). It is quite interesting to get the confirmation that there is no direct link with the written classical novels. Nonetheless, scripts of ancient performances (jiaoben i:*) do exist in some cases, usually historical themes, in order to preserve a tradition; but these are not for use in performance which relies on memory, sometimes with the help of few jotted down notes, biji VE (p. 129). Should it be added that five out of the seven testimonies given here are first-hand documents, published nowhere else? The same can be said of the seven translated performances recorded in script and video. Only the first is a rare recording copied from the original tapes of Nanking Radio taken in 1961. It is instructive, indeed, to compare this text with the slightly different version of the disciple and adopted son of Wang Shaotang 3E:,, (1889-1968), Wang Xiaotang 3EfI , delivered some thirty years later. Deletions and additions are not without significance. For example, the dropping of references to Lii Dongbin and Li Bo (p. 170) may reflect a change in the receptivity of the audience, comparisons which may be extended to other media. Of course, considerations of this sort do not fall within the scope of this book. Its aim is but to offer a vivid and fairly complete vision of Yangzhou pinghua 3WH't'SM.
This proposal by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton formed part of a submission to the BFI (British Film Institute, London UK). It outlines the collaboration between the two artists and the general idea of a film based on the 1917 Robert Walser story "The Walk." The film was to be made entirely out of found footage and found photographs to create a "choreography of movement images" that would portray an individual consciousness. The proposal describes the overall idea, the deployment of Marey's nineteenth-century chronophotographic films, the structure and key narrative elements, as well as different observational, analytical, and emotional threads of images. The proposal was submitted to the BFI in April 2012, and an agreement on the use of archive between the BFI and Siobhan Davies Dance Company was first issued in May and signed off in October 2012. The proposal is reproduced here with the permission of the two artists.
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