Event Details
govettbrewster.comA new choreographic commission by Sophie Gargan.
As part of Len Lye: Motion Compositions at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, Taranaki-born choreographer Sophie Gargan has produced a new movement work entitled Continuum (2024) to be performed under Sky Snakes (1965/2020) across the duration of the exhibition.
The work responds to the artistic intentions underpinning Len Lye’s practice and his understanding of audience experience as a relational exchange of energy ̶ between bodies and kinetics, flesh and steel, cellular metabolisms, and electrical systems.
In Continuum, Gargan attunes each movement to her embodied sense of weight, sensation, and energy. Through duplication, the performance unfolds as a gramma of movement through conscious mental attention to each physical impulse.
Sophie Gargan’s movement practice scrutinises dance as an act of unlearning. Her work abandons aesthetics and traditional training, upending a discipline which often reads as entertainment, rather than a conceptual exercise that uses the medium of the human body.
The performance is accompanied by a score by Taranaki-born / Berlin based sound designer Daisy Wells who employs sound samples from the Len Lye Foundation archive, sonic outputs Lye recorded of his kinetic sculptures performing. Audiences may hear the oscillating theremin tones of Universe (1963-76), the sparkling bells of Witch Dance (1965), or the rhythmical pulse of Watusi (1960). They may catch evidence of Len Lye’s own physiology: background noise through his microphone, or an inward drawn breath.
Price
- Free
Date
- Sat 16 Nov
Time
- 1:00 pm — 1:15 pm
Address
- Govett Brewster Art Gallery
- 42 Queen Street
- Ngāmotu New Plymouth
A new choreographic commission by Sophie Gargan.
As part of Len Lye: Motion Compositions at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, Taranaki-born choreographer Sophie Gargan has produced a new movement work entitled Continuum (2024) to be performed under Sky Snakes (1965/2020) across the duration of the exhibition.
The work responds to the artistic intentions underpinning Len Lye’s practice and his understanding of audience experience as a relational exchange of energy ̶ between bodies and kinetics, flesh and steel, cellular metabolisms, and electrical systems.
In Continuum, Gargan attunes each movement to her embodied sense of weight, sensation, and energy. Through duplication, the performance unfolds as a gramma of movement through conscious mental attention to each physical impulse.
Sophie Gargan’s movement practice scrutinises dance as an act of unlearning. Her work abandons aesthetics and traditional training, upending a discipline which often reads as entertainment, rather than a conceptual exercise that uses the medium of the human body.
The performance is accompanied by a score by Taranaki-born / Berlin based sound designer Daisy Wells who employs sound samples from the Len Lye Foundation archive, sonic outputs Lye recorded of his kinetic sculptures performing. Audiences may hear the oscillating theremin tones of Universe (1963-76), the sparkling bells of Witch Dance (1965), or the rhythmical pulse of Watusi (1960). They may catch evidence of Len Lye’s own physiology: background noise through his microphone, or an inward drawn breath.
