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.
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
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.
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