GOING, GOING
What makes us human?
How does sound connect us?
What keeps us going?
And what happens when we stop?
Filmed & audio recorded during a live performance of Going, Going... (October 2023, at the Acorn, as part of a Distant Dances event) Filmed by Ruby Ingleheart, sound recording by Chris Fayers
Image: screenshot from video by Ruby Ingleheart
Going, Going is a live collaboration between dancer & choreographer Kyra Norman and musician & composer Barnaby Taylor, both based in West Cornwall, UK
Reflecting on Barnaby’s experience of composing for wildlife and nature documentaries (barnabytaylor.com/work) and Kyra's experience working with movement improvisation as performance, the starting point for this collaboration was an idea to create, for an audience, a sense of watching and hearing a slightly unfamiliar species: ourselves
Working with an expanded community of professional dance artists and musicans, aged between 20 and 70, the work invites a thoughtful contemplation of what it is to be human in this complex present moment: a celebration of co-operation, connection and care, in the midst of climate chaos and collapse
We chose to work with structured movement improvisation, so that the audience gets to watch the dancers making decisions and responding to each other, the sound, and the context, in real time - thinking about a definition of documentary as "real people involved in real events". We're also playing with the way that music often works, in wildlife documentary, to add emotional resonance or a sense of narrative progression to actions that are instinctive and unscripted, and may be read in multiple ways.
Thinking along these lines also got us wondering about what traits we might want to choose to highlight as distinctive of humans as a species? In a time of human-led climate crisis, where humans are often seen as the problem – foregrounding our negative impact on the world around us – can we draw attention to the aspects of our humanity that are constructive, collaborative, considerate, willing to be seen as vulnerable, and perhaps still a bit wild? We’ve been thinking about the word ‘tending’ – as in, the things we tend to do (habits), and also our capacity to tend (care for). In these times, there’s an urgency around finding ways to adapt some of our habitual behaviours, and to take better care of each other and this planet, our home.
Photos crowdsourced from the audience at our first performance, in June 2023, at the Acorn, Penzance
We shared a first, 10-minute version of this live dance performance with original music as part of Distant Dances, an evening of live improvised movement and dance performance, at the Acorn, Penzance, in June 2023, with a cast of 10 professional dancers from Cornwall and Devon, aged between 20 and 70.
On Thursday 12th October 2023, we shared a 15-minute version, again as part of a Distant Dances event at the Acorn, Penzance. This version will include some live musical elements (piano, cello, percussion), augmenting the recorded track. Working with a slightly different line-up of 12 dancers – in total we now have a pool of 17 local professional performers involved in and contributing to the work:
Performers (to date)
Angus Balbernie, Angus Capel, Debbie Fionn-Barr, Winona Guy, Hannah Jacobs, Katie Lusby, Phoebe McChesney, Tim Merrifield, Polly Motley, Kyra Norman, Talia Sealey, Harry Scott, Kuldip Singh-Barmi, Sapphire Sumpter, Lois Taylor, Claud Tonietto, Olivia Walton