A very welcome return to Arnolfini - Friday 27 September 2024 - by the renowned choreographer, this time to present two works on film: Transparent (2022) a dazzling autobiographical collage, in which Davies unravels the complex processes and influences that underpin her life’s work in dance; and All This Can Happen (2012), based on Robert Walser’s novella ‘The Walk’ (1917). The screenings will be accompanied by a short talk with the artist.
Book at arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/siobhandaviesfilmworks/
Created by Siobhan Davies and filmmaker David Hinton in 2012, All This Can Happen is a film constructed entirely from archive photographs and footage from the earliest days of cinema. Based on Robert Walser’s novella The Walk (1917), the film follows the footsteps of the protagonist as series of small adventures and chance encounters take the walker from idiosyncratic observations of ordinary events towards a deeper pondering on the comedy, heartbreak and ceaseless variety of life. A flickering dance of intriguing imagery brings to light the possibilities of ordinary movements from the everyday which appear, evolve and freeze before your eyes. Juxtapositions, different speeds and split frame techniques convey the walker’s state of mind as he encounters a world of hilarity and despair.
‘Davies and Hinton have achieved the near-impossible: a film both harrowing and full of levity, pathological and poignant, microscopic and expansive.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, BFI Sight & Sound
Transparent (created with David Hinton and Hugo Glendinning) is a gentle manifesto and a visionary work of art itself. At the heart of the film are the reflections of dancer and choreographer Siobhan Davies as she unravels the complex processes that underpin a life’s work in dance. At the same time she looks far beyond herself, touching upon the histories of movement embedded in each of us, allowing the watcher to enter a descriptive world and feel the weight of their own body - walking or turning or falling. The images in the film echo Davies’ thoughts, showing the physical fluidity and depth of movement between all things. Many of these things are from the art world - from ancient sculpture through modern artworks and personal photos. The art is seen to be both felt and material, then transformed by the dancer into something they can hold and use.
“The film is called Transparent because for several years I used both tracing paper and acetate to write down notes and collect imagery. Dance involves movement and constant change and the see-through nature of my note taking helped me to experience ideas and images as less fixed in time or place but rather on the way to becoming something else or emerging out of what came before.” Siobhan Davies
For Davies each interaction with a work of art is a collaboration, every cultural experience an opportunity to absorb, internalise and re-use the most precious thoughts and feelings of others. Her work with David Hinton and Hugo Glendinning is no different, turning the filming process into a choreography, intertwining three very different makers’ visions to construct a rich screen work that shape shifts between biography, lecture, exhibition, psychological study and scientific experiment. Transparent is a lucid and optimistic work, on the surface there is a delicate sense of an autobiographical narrative, but this narrative can be seen through to reveal an unfixable archive of movement and experience.
“Transparent, you discover, becomes a web of images, words, sounds and ideas, shimmering with synaptic connections that form and fade like memory itself.” Sanjoy Roy, dance writer, The Guardian.