Angela Woodhouse and Caroline Broadhead: Surface Tension & (de)figured

Caroline Broadhead and Angela Woodhouse, Surface Tension & (de)figured, June 28

By evincing the intelligence underpinning the process of formal and conceptual exploration, two recent projects by choreographer Angela Woodhouse fit into and exceed the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘collaboration’ as ‘the action of working together with someone to produce something’. Thermal Duets is a series of five choreographic videos shot with a thermal camera and developed with Nic Sandiland and artist Caroline Broadhead as part of the latter’s exhibition Surface Tension at Mardsen Woo Gallery, while (de)figured is ‘a series of live action drawings by dancers’ created with sculptor Nathaniel Rackowe and dancers Martina Conti and Alice Labant presented in and around Dora House, home of the Royal Society of Sculptors in South Kensington. 

Broadhead’s practice brings together fine and applied arts through her expertise in jewellery design. In Surface Tension she rearticulates the relation between material and form by re-creating domestic objects and furniture. An antique picture frame is carefully pulled apart and remounted as a soft, almost articulated necklace that has lost its capacity to hold; a chair is encrusted in a fine silvery chain mail and another has its seat replaced with a geometric pattern of threads; a stool stands precariously on pointed feet while its finely beaded cast lies beside it like the divested skin of an eighteenth-century écorché. In stripping furniture of its functionality, Broadhead draws attention to its intimate relation to the body alluded to in the naming of its constituent parts — head, neck, back, arm, leg, and foot — and in the signs of wear that bear the shape of the bodies that have used them (what nineteenth century dressmakers used to call ‘memories’). Woodhouses’s series Thermal Duets resonates with this investigation of form, material and functionality. The technology of thermal photography was developed for military and surveillance purposes but is here transposed in an intimate context of choreographic stillness and minute movement. The videos are displayed on I-phones in black frames that draw the visitor close as if to a miniature watercolour or embroidery. We see the diaphanous blue and yellow silhouettes of two dancers in each frame while the body heat is revealed in shades of red. A description by John Berger comes to mind: ‘The bodies of dancers with their kind of devotion are dual…A kind of Uncertainty Principle determines them; instead of being alternately particle and wave, their bodies are ultimately giver and gift.’ The intensity and overlaying of colours makes the proximity and interaction of the bodies tangible: the lingering warmth of a hand caressing a back, an arm delicately moving away, or the intense vibration of breath as two heads folds towards each and then separate. Affect is here a residue of presence, a memory of touch. Woodhouse and Broadhead’s use of the thermal camera has transposed Berger’s view into luminous traces of orange-red dance.

The live action drawings of (de)figured are no less an exploration of surfaces, materials and physicality but on a three-dimensional scale. Rackowe’s choice of portable construction-site materials — breeze blocks, yellow scaffolding nets and ropes — relates the impermanent nature of the work and its re-configuration for different sites to the perceived permanence and solidity of buildings, teasing the porous relations between interior and exterior, rigid and pliant. The performance starts on the pavement of Onslow Gardens across the road from Dora House. Slowly unrolling a carefully measured yellow rope Conti walks backwards towards the Old Brompton Road with a serene calculation that contrasts with the bustle of passersby and the congested traffic. Across the road, Labant wraps herself enigmatically inside a scaffolding net hanging down over the entrance portico. The affect of the perceptive and emotional interchange between bodies and environment is central to (de)figured, though here plasticity and weight gain prominence. The yellow rope on the pavement remains as a trace of the initial action that, after Conti’s negotiated hiatus crossing the road, quietly moves indoors with Labant unrolling a black rope from the pavement up the broad entrance steps into the reception area, threading it around breezeblocks in the hall and two adjacent rooms into what was once the studio of court photographers, Elliot and Fry. The meditative pace of Woodhouse’s choreographic movement, like a silent line-drawing, figuratively conflates durability and transience, contrasting the solidity of walls and interior surfaces with the pliability of bodies and soft materials. (de)figured dematerializes in the shadows of the dancers’ bodies projected by industrial lamps on to a wall of the studio. Between them hangs Barbara Hepworth’s Construction 1 (part of the gallery’s current exhibition), taking the notion of collaboration to another level. 

Nathaniel Rackowe & Angela Woodhouse, (Un)touched

Nathaniel Rackowe and Angela Woodhouse, (Un)touched, Fold Gallery, July 15

Martina Conti and Stine Nilsen in (Un)touched (photo: Noah Da Costa)

Nathaniel Rackowe’s exhibition Threshold at Fold Gallery in Fitzrovia includes some recent wall-based light works and the diptych (Un)touched, a collaborative installation the artist has developed with choreographer Angela Woodhouse. Boundaries are a key motif Rackowe explores by pushing the edges of both form and matter. The wall-based works use fluorescent tubes and coated glass panels whose planes juxtapose and superimpose. Characteristically, Rackowe engages with light not so much as a medium but rather as a means to dissolve the material edges of the panels into transparent and reflective layers of evanescent colour. Echoing Rackowe’s ideas, Woodhouse in (Un)touched interpolates her own investigation of boundaries through movement. Their collaboration has developed over a period of three years and one can feel the maturing of the process in the work’s synergies. Woodhouse has an intuitive ability to find spaces in the choreographic firmament that have not been explored and where collaboration offers new creative possibilities, while Rackowe’s concepts of form, space and light welcome such an approach.

The material framework of (Un)touched consists of two separate structures that take up the central floor area of the gallery. The first is an elongated rectangular grid made of neatly detailed industrial panels of perforated steel and expanded mesh interspersed with ones of coated glass; the second is a low square steel platform covered with reinforced glass on which the audience can stand. The two structures relate to each other as a nave to the apse of a church and the way they both fit into the gallery makes it seem as they were made specifically for it.

Woodhouse interfaces the materiality of these structures with the choreographed movement of two dancers, Stine Nilsen and Martina Conti. The audience is invited to walk around while Nilsen and Conti wander through the maze of intersecting planes as if engaging in a game of silent encounters that are only fulfilled in the mirroring of the dancers’ movements through glass and in their fading reflections. Occasionally they hold the gaze of a member of the audience, so that watching them we experience mutating levels of intimacy that emerge and then recede into a proximity that is never achieved. The sequencing of fluorescent lighting that in turn makes the glass panels transparent (fleetingly bringing dancers and audience into close visual proximity) and opaque (reflecting an image of both dancers and audience back on themselves) intensifies the interplay of presence and absence, of invisibility and appearance. In addition the perforated steel panels create pixelated images of the dancers’ bodies placed behind them, whilst open spaces in the structure reveal the fullness of the body and intermittent blackouts reset our threshold of vision. It is in these multiple views that the full value of (Un)touched emerges and where the visions of Rackowe and Woodhouse meet. The dancers breathe life into the inert structure and partner it through the choreographic journey while the audience becomes an integral part of such a journey through the visual permutations of each change of perspective.

Following Nilsen’s and Conti’s beguiling game in the ‘nave’, after a short pause the audience is invited into the ‘apse’ to congregate around the second structure; the two dancers reappear under the glass, as alive and motionless as fish seen from the surface of the water. Again the fluorescent tubes inside the structure and on the walls above it create changing degrees of transparency through the glass although our perspective is relatively fixed. We are invited to walk on the surface but the sense of standing over the dancers is an ambivalent pleasure as they move lithely beneath us. Because of the limited space under the glass, the intimacy between dancers is physical, sensual, as Conti nestles her head under Nilsen’s arm or Nilsen rolls over to embrace Conti’s shape. The two bodies seem suspended in the changing lights, making their shapes and forms flit between transient beauty and our own figures peering into the glass, our reflections descending to the ceiling. The entire performance challenges our mode of interaction with the subject, from voyeuristic distance to the intimacy of regard and tentative physical communication as Nilsen and Conti rediscover what touch might mean at the edges of proximity. They engage with each other and with the audience in such a calm, ordered way that although there is no musical accompaniment to the performance, the movement and light contain within them an implicit auditory sensation of serenity that reverberates through the small gallery, completing the sensory universe that Rackowe and Woodhouse have created. The applause at the end breaks the reverie and returns us to our reality.