DIY BALLROOM / LIVE
About
DIY Ballroom / Live
The following notes were presented as part of The Bigger Picture panel, with Helen Wewiora, Perry Bard, Esther Johnson, and Juneau Projects. Urban Screens conference, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 11 – 12 October 2007
Intro
DIY Ballroom / Live is a two-part project, comprising a video/audio work and a series of live, participatory events. The project develops and expands on previous work, taking up ideas around cultural dance, amateurism, migration, aspiration, the local and the international. Such work includes the audio/video piece REEL (2005, 5 mins 14 secs), which came out of a residency with the Media Archive of Central England, and featured in the Bigger Picture’s Big Dance programme last year. Another is the interdisciplinary project Golden (2005, ongoing), which encompasses video, audio, installation, and a number of collaborative and participatory performance events, including several improvised ballroom instruction sessions, and a flashmob gathering at London’s Vauxhall station, under the banner, Mobile Ballroom. Most recently was a one-off DIY Biennale Ballroom at Chisenhale Art Place, London, as part of their inaugural Chisenhale biennale. DIY Ballroom / Live is, then, part of an ongoing, experimental process of practice-led research, with an emphasis on the participatory and performative.
DIY Ballroom
The motif of ballroom has emerged across this work as a vehicle and arena of nostalgia and aspiration, in terms of the stylised and often gendered, codified forms of social interaction, class and culture. I’m also interested in the notion of an ‘international standard’, and its heterogeneity when visualised and materialised through amateur participation and performance.
DIY Ballroom is developed entirely from footage in the online public realm, exploring ‘amateurism’ in terms of both dance and its documentation. Having previously had the opportunity to sample the independent commercial television news footage held in a formal archive, my aim here was to turn to the informal, amateur, virtual archives accruing online at such sites as YouTube and GoogleVideo. The clips are selected and organised by my amateurish eye according to what I can perceive to be certain styles, though I’m probably mistaken in places – so it’s also about the mistranslation of dance languages by a non-authority. Perhaps ”DIY Ballroom”: can be described an always already outdated snap-shot of the online archived present as alternative ‘amateur’ dance film, a collation of asynchronous gestures, steps and the disparate sites by which the ‘local’ and ‘international’ are inhabited and performed.
DIY Ballroom Live
DIY Ballroom Live – taking place tomorrow afternoon at 2pm outside Urbis – is conceived as both complement and augmentation of DIY Ballroom. Inviting ballroom amateurs, enthusiasts, fans, and absolute beginners to dress up, show up and take to the floor, the idea is for the seemingly spontaneous live gathering to mirror the pre-recorded spectacle on the public screen; to offset the degrees of disciplined practice on display with an array of unsychronised, improvised moves; and to interweave the analogue with the digital, the remote with the local. This will be the first of several events – others are planned for Leeds and Sheffield – which will be filmed and fed live to the corresponding public screen, displacing online with offline footage, and which will eventually be edited into an expanded videowork, and uploaded online.
It’s also a way of exploring the idea of ‘engineered spontaneity’; taking inspiration from flashmob culture, which relies on the will of disparate individuals to respond to a call to a given time and place to engage in a particular activity, as well as the kind of almost magical can-do spontaneous spirit in musicals, where the idea of putting on a show ‘right here, right now’ is never impossible, and the segue from the everyday into apparently improvised song and dance numbers is almost always seamless. I’m also interested in attempting to emulate – and failing to achieve – such a transition, which I find intriguing, in terms of how it speaks to notions of aspiration as well as a means of accessing, inhabiting or performing an aspirational mode; and in terms of what emerges if or when the transition is far from seamless, the dream-like sequence flawed, disjointed, yet the effort, the can-do, have-a-go spirit still there, driven, driving, towards something.
So there is an emphasis is on the disjuncture between the collective and the individual, and the tension between participation and isolation, as participants dance their own steps, perhaps with a partner, to the rhythm or beats in their head. Beginners are often encouraged to practice steps alone, partner walks, or basic movements without music. Instead of music then, the videowork is punctuated by an abstract, non-melodic soundtrack built up from free online midi-files, basic rhythms for the waltz, chacha, rumba, foxtrot, tango, and swing that layer and differ in tempo, stressing the asynchrony of dancers. DIY Ballroom / Live will interrupt the prosaic with the playful, to improvise an amateur aesthetics, towards an awkward, pleasurable spectacle and experience of the make-shift.
Since 2003 The Bigger Picture has been working with the BBC Big Screen Network to commission exceptional artist film and video works for wide audiences, in the public domain. The Bigger Picture exhibits artists’ film & video, interactive / participatory screen based projects and arts-based community moving image. Utilising the unique context of Big Screen Manchester, The Bigger Picture is able to present a host of artists’ works to large, diverse, yet often fleeting audiences, reaching far beyond the traditional gallery context. Past commissions have seen new works by The Light Surgeons, Louise K Wilson, Adele Prince, Paul C Melia, Hilary Jack, Kartoon Kings and Joe Lawlor /Christine Molloy (desperate optimists).
The Bigger Picture National Commissions are four new works for Big Screens that aim to push boundaries in the use of public space, audience participation and interaction. Launched as part of Urban Screens, this touring programme was commissioned by the Bigger Picture, with partners Enter_, Lumen, and Site Gallery.
DIY Ballroom/Live / The Bigger Picture / Urban Screens / Cornerhouse / Enter_ / Lumen / Site Gallery
