- Venue
- Wilkinson Gallery
- Location
- London
My Father’s Grace was devised and performed by Joe Moran and represented the finale of Dance Art, a short season of dance co-produced by Intimate Contenders and Falling Wide in London gallery spaces from October 07 – January 08. The piece consisted of Moran himself dancing a 40 minute solo in the empty ground floor gallery of Wilkinson Gallery to an audience of approximately 30 people.
As a performance My Father’s Grace was stark in its gestures and appearance. Moran wore basic, casual red training clothes, used no props and only the basic gallery lighting. He also kept all dance moves down to only the most necessary. The soundscape for the work was also minimal, including separate sections of electronic pulses, natural sounds and one light folksy tune. Despite this starkness Moran’s choreography was varied throughout; long periods of lying deathly still were combined with primeval style writhings on the floor interspersed with flowing movements that ended abruptly with strangely closed, strangulated gestures. His was indeed a skilled, knowledgeable body performing highly emotional, personal feelings of death, mourning, mental anguish and joy. However, how Moran’s movements related to the audience, or to the visual art context of Wilkinson Gallery, is not clear.
Dance Art’s aim is to explore dance’s interface with the visual arts, to celebrate the porosity of dance as a genre, and so it is a shame that My Father’s Grace did not grey the boundaries of visual art and dance or utilise the context of Wilkinson Gallery more overtly. This lack of address is also unfortunate on a critical level. With no specific narrative or formal elements tying the work to the gallery context it is easy to believe that the presence of My Father’s Grace amongst the bare walls of Wilkinson Gallery is convenient or circumstantial; it presents dance as something simple akin to a curatorial and financial 'gallery filler' in between periods of exhibition de-installation or commercial shows.
The lack of acknowledgement of the visual art context is also unfortunate because Moran’s approach to mark making as physical gesture, including his stated desire to show ‘instinctive meanings inherent in the moving body’ in order to explore ‘natural intimacies between performer and audience’ suffers when seen within a contemporary visual art perspective. In contrast to contemporary dance or interdisciplinary works that thrive in shared territory of dance and visual arts – by choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roi and artists Pablo Bronstein and Kelly Nipper- Moran’s insistence upon meaning as embodied, and therefore primal (original, basic and simple), together with its unmediated translation to the audience, comes across as problematic and indebted to a removed and purist twentieth century narrative of formal modernism; of autonomy, abstraction, material meaning and form. With this approach My Father’s Grace enacts Moran’s body-in-performance as a modernist art object; as inherently meaningful – and intellectually and economically ‘valuable’ – in and by its formal materiality. Moran’s performance then – contrary to his desire to explore ‘natural intimacies’ between dancer and audience- highlights the interaction between audience and performer as heavily mediated, unnatural and hierarchical by setting itself up as an art object that is distant, removed and insistent upon its autonomy. In this sense Moran’s performance compounds the (mistaken) belief that the work- in this instance the body- in its gestures, skill and abstraction can only be worshipped from afar, or translated by experts.
Despite these underlying critical failures there were moments of joy in My Father’s Grace. By alternately turning the gallery lights off and on in the first section Moran created a pitch black ‘off stage’ facility that enabled an invisible dance in which the sounds of Moran’s bare feet brushing the gallery floor were the only evidence as to his movements. Although I think it unlikely that this basic light show was a deliberate witty reference to Martin Creed’s famed conceptual Work No. 227 ‘The Lights Going On and Off’ (2000) it was none-the-less effective in highlighting the performativity of unseen or invisible dance movements. This invisibility, combined with Moran's long moments of staying still lying down, neatly challenged the expectations of an audience who had paid £12 each to see the artist's choreography.
Another highlight of the evening was ‘In Land’ (2006) a video shown alongside My Father’s Grace in the Wilkinson Gallery lobby. It depicted two people linked together whilst rolling slowly and laboriously over a grassy landscape. Despite the necessarily removed or surface interaction implied by the video monitor, the sheer materiality of the two bodies and the physical exertion involved in rolling over the grassy mounds was clearly at stake in this work and beautifully at odds with the effortless nature of the depicted pastoral scene. In contrast to My Father’s Grace, In Land used the natural landscape in which it was filmed to enact recognisable mark making and meaning in physical gesture. And so on the night it was with In Land – a work that celebrated the embedded, unskilled, less-seen and unglamorous aspects of physical performance; the lumpen physicality and weight of the body and the strenuous effects of gravity upon it that are vital in order to make movement, be it dance movement or not – that Moran proved dance can speak a distinctly twenty first century visual arts language.
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My Father's Grace (2007) was devised and performed by Joe Moran. Technical Manager: Rachel Shipp, Visual Projection taken from the work of Alexander Sokurov. Soundscape and music by Chris Watson and Sufjan Stevens. In Land (2006) was directed by Joe Moran, filmed by Jane Barnwell and Robert Napoletani, danced by Florence Peak and Kirstie Richardson and edited by Ultan Molloy. For more details see http:www.fallingwide.com/
