Bodies of Work
performance - video - choreography

My creative history moves between the live body and the screen dance. The practice of making art has been as much about finding the right form through which to express myself, as it has been about the personal statements I have made in my artworks. The search for the ultimate vehicle has been a process of accumulation rather than elimination. I am interested in experimenting with the synergies and tensions between live improvisation and video documentary. My artistic practice is concerned with documentary - spending time in a place (the body) and allowing it to reveal its own stories and truths.

performance

Scenes From Another Life (2003) [youtube]

"(the performance) attempts to synthesize my hybrid body, to resolve my self-image and my imagined self. My choreography has become a montage of my other lives public & private, past & present, actual & virtual, real & imagined, stage & screen, as live body and televisual body." (Scenes From Another Life 2003)

"It was amongst the jesters that the principles of improvisation were most fully embraced... Dianne Reid and Shaun McLeod were superb, employing a soft, elegant take on improvised comedic text and performative pathos. It was their seesawing between unaffected, dancerly turns of beautiful fluidity and more pedestrian movements and banal scenarios which made their nightly performances so affecting." (The Dance Card, Jonathan Marshall in Realtime, Issue 60, April/May 2004)

video

Neglect (2003) [youtube]

"In choreographing for video I am exploring mechanisms by which I can translate the kinaesthetic intimacy of dance and the body to the screen - to make my sweat bead on the surface of the screen... The film itself, the distillation of the entire creative process of filmmaking, becomes, for me, like my own body dancing - a single action or statement that is the 'elixir' of my entire lived, and danced, history."

In 'choreographing' the camera I am concerned with establishing a shared terrain between camera (viewer) and dancer, an intimate relationship in which the emotional and psychological impact of the kinaesthetic experience is revealed. This means that the camera must not only participate in the movement spatially, rhythmically, dynamically, but it must understand the nature of its interpersonal relationship with the dancer. Essentially, I am trying to imbue the camera with an identity, one which is known to the dancer and which they are prepared to trust with their personal disclosure, with their 'imperfections and frailties'.

choreography

Needing and Wanting Things (2007) [youtube]

I regard choreography as a tool rather than an end in itself. The sequence of 'steps' is a means for arriving at an 'understanding', a shared participation in an embodied experience.

"Being a performer myself, that is what I enjoy. Inner processes, finding ways to reveal myself and to embody the movement in a way that makes sense for me. So I am interested in facilitating dancers to work from a really experiential, spontaneous place because that is the only place they are going to find something unique to themselves." (interview with Virginia Norris, 'Giving Movement History' in Research in Dance Education, Vol 4.2, Routledge, 2003) journalsonline.tandf.co.uk

Dianne Reid CV: DianneReid_bio08.pdf