Susan Philipsz - SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London

 On a Sunday afternoon the City of London is dead, the Bank of England lies dormant and inpenetrable like an over-sized mausoleum. It feels like trespassing when walking down alleyways past closed Starbucks in search of the voice of Turner prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz. From the escalator to Moorgate High Walk her voice slowly becomes audible as we move up from street level, on Milk Street the repeated long draw of the violin bow reflects of the glass facade of the buildings opposite. 

The songs she sings are from 17th Century London and they belong to a secret world that seems removed from the way we live which fits the atmosphere of the city over the weekend. The songs she sings come from a time when voice was a prevalent sound on the streets of the city, so much so that the criers and callers of that period inspired the popular music composed by Thomas Ravenscroft which Philipsz lend her voice to in this comission by Artangel.

 The surround sound fills the entire volume of the open spaces, her voice follows her voice, unaccomponied, harmonising with herself in a round. She does not have an exceptionally good voice, she can sing in tune and rather high without wavering.

CORA LINN

Recently I made a trip to Scotland to make field recordings and a 16mm film of a series of waterfalls on the River Clyde an hour south of Glasgow. 

Cora Linn at 90ft is the highest waterfall in a series of three which break the course of the river in New Lanark, South Lanarkshire. Widely recognised as an area of natural beauty, the waterfalls were used as a subject in the Romantic era by William Wordsworth in the poem Composed at Cora Linn and J.M.W Turner in the painting Falls of Clyde.

Falls of Clyde - J.M.W Turner

The area is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the town of New Lanark was reformed as an experiment in Utopian - Socialism by Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen during the Industrial Revolution. The power of the water harnessed to drive cotton mills and the adjacent buildings housing mill workers and their families. Today the force of the water continues to run Bonnington Power station, the first hydro-electric power station in Scotland.

When we arrived in New Lanark it was covered in a blanket of heavy snow and resembled a winter scene the likes of I'd only ever witnessed on a Christmas card. Fortunately the falls were still roaring as I had been worried they would be frozen, putting an end to my hopes of recording their sound. We took a walk from our hotel along the path upstream to look for possible locations for the film shoot.

 

During our walk I made field recordings using bi-naural microphones to record the waterfalls and an elecro-magnetic coil to pick up the hum of the power station. The recordings will be recomposed into one track which will exist as a CD and constitute as part of the soundtrack to the film.

Busby Berkeley

Reconstructing geometric shapes and patterns using the body can be seen in the large group routines of choreographer and film director Busby Berkeley.

Laban & Geometry

Rudolf  Laban (1879  - 1958) was a dance artist and theorist who inventented a graphical system of analysing and recording movement known as Labanotation. Laban describes the area surrounding the body as the Kinesphere, the lines of extension that trace movements to the dancers' furthest point produce a diagramatic representation of movements which resemble the geometries of crystalline structures.

In Labanotation the directional movement of parts of the body in space are represented by symbols which convey the transition from one movement to another and can be read in linear way, from bottom to top. The system allows a notation of movement from a basic description of which way a part of the body is moving to more complex anotations of facial expressions, transference of weight and quality of movement.

Burton Beach (Tango)

Burton Tango from Sybella Perry on Vimeo.

The video was shot on the Dorset coast with the soundtrack consisting of contact mic recordings from Musical Moving sessions and locational contact recordings of the beach.

DANCE & ART

There are a few exhibtions and related events coming up over the next few months concerning dance and art.

MOVE:Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre


ROTOR at Siobhan Davies Dance

AWAKENINGS

Since I have joined Musical Moving I thought it necessary to educate myself a bit about Parkinsonism and was kindly lent the book 'Awakenings' written by physician and neurologist Oliver Sacks. Although the book is primarily studies of patients suffering from a sleeping - sickness, who have been awakened by the administration of a new wonder drug L-Dopamine, there are sections which describe the Parkinsonian condition in great detail as in the 1960's patients where also administered the same drug.

Sacks' writes particularly about the Parkinsonian experience of space and time and the neurological manifestations of the disease, he recalls the work of Dr James Parkinson who defined Parkinsons as a singular condition in which there are forms of behaviour, rather than a symptomatic disease. Tremor or shaking commonly thought of as the most obvious symptom, is rarely constant and by no means an isolated characteristic of the condition. It is not merely motor, the resistance to movement, the speeding, slowing, stopping and starting also occur in the mind throughout thought patterns. It is apt then that dance and also singing are activities in which Parkinsonians find spirit but also strategies to master certain behaviours.

'We must come down from our position as objective observers, and meet our patients face-to-face; we must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginitve encounter: for it is only in the context of such a collaboration, a participation, a relation, that we can hope to learn anything about how they are."
Sacks.