written feedback from audience member, artist and curator Carole Luby on the ‘blue’ performance installation:
“Angela Kennedy believes in how the body can convey, through the slightest of movements, a deep and resonating connection with all bodies.
Her work Blue in the gorgeous light and spacious environment on the first floor of Highbridge studios moved me in ways that I had not anticipated. As an ex dancer, but still enjoying a dialogue through her body, she refuses to give us the usual conventions of what we think we know about how the body should respond as in a choreographed intervention; she transforms the way in which we approach our normative ways of viewing and understanding of what we witness.
Blue also refuses a linear narrative; decisions made to open the line of windows along the wall, use the chair, revealed a psychological and physical opening up, also challenging our usual conventions as to how the performer engages with the audience.
As the performance progressed we were moved around the space. It was as if we were not there. But we were intimately involved with everything that was going on. Blue gave us a sense of ownership as well as a reason for feeling unseen. Disconcerting and unsettling as it was, we were unable to take our eyes off Angela as she occupied the space with images resounding with a neurotic madness, rage, tension and a compulsion to return time and time again to the inner body.
A chair, the only prop. I was reminded again of the Pina Bausch performances where a chair becomes a world, a space, a universe and the human body a repository for all the emotions a person experiences.
In its entirety Blue represented a nemesis in all that is pleasurable ….. which generously offered me an opportunity to think afresh of what it means to be human.”
