The Running Tongue: Collaboration, Choice and Community

Abstract

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.