WORKSHOP I / WATERFALL I

 

Two films by Sybella Perry

An exhibition of related material can be found at the FreeSpace gallery, 1st Floor until May 2011

Preview film screening in the Sun Room 31st March 6-8pm with a performance from 

Sing for Joy in the Atrium

Films on permanent display in Ground Floor waiting area from 1st April 2011

Workshop 1 - Musical Moving & Sing for Joy

 

 

 

On 31st January Musical Moving and the Sing for Joy choir met for the first time to take part in the first in a potential series of workshops combining voice with movement led by Carol Grimes and Anna Gillespe. I organised the workshop outside of the health centre as we needed space to film and record sound without getting in the way too much. The film was shot on 16mm and will be shown along with the waterfall film made in Scotland at KTHC on 31st March. Thank you to my crew David Angus, Vasco Alves and Tim Bowditch for all their help and support. All production stills by Tim Bowditch.

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.