KMA » Blog

New work: Congregation

Kit — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:30:23 +0000

KMA’s most ambitious work to date, Congregation will be the world’s first ever ballet designed, choreographed and composed entirely for pedestrian performers. There will be no rehearsal and no textual input: participants will simply respond to the choreography of light and sound in an embodied, rather than verbal, discourse. The score for Congregation has been created by Portland-based composer Peter Broderick.

Commissioned by SCAN and British Council, Congregation is due to premiere simultaneously at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai as part of World Expo and Bournemouth for the Inside Out Festival, followed by further performances at Tate Britain, London.

Congregation illuminates the responses that humans make to interruption and interference in their environment. The interruption, in this example, is the arrival of a lone figure (The Angel). This figure cannot communicate, can barely move and appears powerless. Despite its impotence, the figure is utterly immovable, indelible, and as such must be perceived as super-human, with an authority and permanence as powerful as any force of nature. If it will not adapt, it demands to be acknowledged; and the witnesses of the arrival must establish a relationship with it. Our human need to believe – to attribute meaning, to understand our environment – leads us to make extraordinary attempts to relate to this enigmatic presence, and we fall quickly upon universal patterns of religion, spirituality, faith. We seek affirmation in sharing these beliefs with our neighbours, and attempt to reduce and distill the mystery into something tangible. Communities form as consensus develops, and factions seek to confirm their specific relationship with the visitor by defining their differences from each other.

And what then becomes of us should this visitor depart? Are we willing to accept that what seemed permanent was merely an apparition – that we were fooled, and foolish – or was the power in the shared experience sufficient to outlive the trigger? Will we miss our visitor, or rejoice in the reaction which was catalysed? Was the act of the moment more telling than the subject?

Congregation

Kit — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:14:08 +0000

Tom and I head off to Bournemouth on Tuesday to begin work creating KMA’s latest (and greatest…) work, Congregation. Pretty much all of June will be taken up with the work’s development (the small matter of World Cup watching notwithstanding), and will include a mad dash to Shanghai to look at a potential space for the work’s performance there in September.

Patchy bloggers, at the very best, we’re going to make a concerted effort to keep making regular updates to this page as development and travel progresses…

Great Street Games footage

Tom — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:36:56 +0000

It’s always been difficult capturing our work on camera – the pieces are created to be experienced rather than observed – but it’s especially difficult with a project as challenging as last year’s Great Street Games. On the second and third nights of the performance, I drove up and down between Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland trying to capture some moments from each venue on camera. That was straightforward enough, but it was when I tried to put together the footage into some kind of meaningful document that I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t work out how to get across both the immediacy of the interaction in an individual venue, and the sense of networked community that was created by the event. So I gave up. But yesterday, I came across this footage again, and decided that the best thing for it was just to put a brief collection of shots together and let it speak for itself. Yes, it’s confusing, requires more explanation, and will probably prompt more questions than it answers: but there it is… If I work out how I really should put together a document from all this footage, I will do so, but until then there’s this on vimeo.

Great Street Games on Flickr

Tom — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:14:26 +0000

Great Street Games – 283/365, originally uploaded by Paul J White.

A wonderful image from the Great Street Games in Gateshead found on Flickr. Thanks to photographer Paul White

Strange Attractors images

Tom — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:20:36 +0000

Strange Attractors, originally uploaded by andfestival.

Some great images coming in from Liverpool. This is one of my favourites.

More projectors in high places

Tom — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:22:07 +0000

This one on top of FACT in Liverpool as we set up Strange Attractors, which opens on Wednesday.

Artists Taking The Lead

Tom — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:26:36 +0000

We’re delighted that our 5Circles2012 project (in collaboration with Pilot Theatre) has been shortlisted for Artists Taking The Lead.

Part of the programme for the 2012 London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Artists Taking The Lead is a commissioning programme that will create 12 major new works of art for Britain. We’re one of five shortlisted artists from the Yorkshire region who will be presenting to the panel before a final decision is made in mid October. All in all, 59 artists across the country were shortlisted from over 2000 applications, so we’re very excited to be part of this select group.

5Circles2012 is a project that will see five large circular stages in five Yorkshire cities – creating giant urban light playgrounds. Each circle will host a series of interactive games and public art installations, with a projector suspended above the ground which will react to the movement of the people within the space. Through this, people will have a unique interaction with light, sound and the other participants. The project will be accompanied by an interactive website, allowing people to create and programme their own sequences in the circles. It will be rolled out from five cities to five countries to five continents up to 2012, spreading across the world from Yorkshire.

To keep up-to-date with project news, please visit out 5circles2012 project pages.

Abandon Normal Devices (in September)

Tom — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:13:08 +0000

Early July, and as the nights start drawing in, so the possibility of nice, dark, urban spaces playing host to new work returns. We’ve been commissioned by FACT in Liverpool to create a new work for the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival in September/October this year, which promises to be a fascinating event. For our part, we’re creating a work that focusses on the human body, both as participant and as subject matter.

Strange Attractors is a meditation on the balance and structure of the human anatomy, drawing on influences from both modern and ancient understandings and set at the point where the two meet. It will be a study of embodied discourse; how we use our bodies to move and to communicate in a material world, and how our bodies mediate between the internal and external worlds, at a microscopic and global level.

Jet Lag

Tom — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:32:25 +0000

I’m just back from China, and reeling with all the sights, sounds, smells and tastes that the last two weeks brought. It’s an incredible country at a remarkable time, and although I’ve hardly scratched the surface with two visits in the last year, I’m beginning to feel attached to the place. This must be in part due to the warmth, enthusiasm and generosity of the people I’ve met there: the last week was no exception. I was in Chongqing for a 4-day forum on ‘Transforming Public Spaces’, run by the *deep breath* Cultural and Education Section of the British Consulate General in China. A day of discussion, followed by a 48 hour workshop where 4 groups worked towards a final day of presentations was an intensive format, but it seemed to be a challenge taken on with enthusiasm by all involved. Each group was assigned one of Chongqing’s many and wildly varied public spaces to work with – for my group, that was People’s Square.

It’s an incredible space – 25,000 sq. m in all, boldly claiming one of the only flat spaces in this vertical city between the Great Hall of the People and the Three Gorges Museum. As well as a tourist attraction and icon of the city, it’s an outdoor gym: used by thousands of people every day for dancing (from ballroom to tango to breaking), Tai Chi, aerobics, badminton… the list is endless. Being surrounded by over a thousand people dancing in (near) perfect synchronisation to a soundtrack of disco competing with red songs, is a surreal experience for the uninitiated: yet it happens here every night.

We’re hoping to return to Chongqing later in the year to bring some of our own work to the city: we’ll post details here as they emerge. In the meantime, I’m going to do my best to reset my body clock and get down to the business of making a film. More on that later…

Next stop Shanghai

Tom — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:12:26 +0000

Spring is arriving, and with it comes what looks to be one of the busiest years we’ve faced. We’re really happy that our first public piece of 2009, Waves, is up-and-running and seems to be having quite an impact on the unsuspecting population of Chelmsford, where it will now run until the 9th March. We managed to get a bit more video from Monday night and it’s up on the Waves page and vimeo. Some stills from the event can also be seen here.

As is so often the case, the interaction appears to be led by children, who aren’t yet burdened with the reticence that comes with age – and is then taken up by the adults whose responses are hugely varied. An average response seems to go something like this: enquiry > confusion > suspicion > investigation > amusement > spinning in a circle.

In just over a week, we’re off to China, where we’re stopping for a few days in Shanghai before heading to Chongqing for a British Council forum on ‘Transforming Public Spaces’. As the fastest growing city in the world, with something like half a million people arriving every year, the city faces enormous social challenges. We’re hoping to find out something about how the people of Chongqing feel about their public spaces, what place public art might have in such an extraordinary situation, and how our work might translate to such a different context. It promises to be a fascinating exploration.