hmmmmm

HD/ 5 hour three-screen installation / 2015

hmmmmm is a multi-screen performance video installation created for the exhibition space at Crescent Arts in 2015.

hmmmmm is an experiment, movement as research. We are untrained dancers – the installation may fluctuate between humor and gravity as we dance for the five hours. The projected images become like a memory of the act, held in the space, replaying before the viewer’s eyes. What does it mean to really be present? We’re interested in consciousness, the act of perception, and the boundaries between self and other.  | Webb-Ellis 2015

REVIEW by Steven Malorie Potter

The recording of our performance in the two exhibition areas at Crescent Arts, with a camera in each space, is projected into the same spaces, in real time. The dance is led by Christopher Boylan, a teacher of ‘5 Rhythms’, a form of ecstatic movement which focuses on the present moment and aims to explore both inner and outer worlds of human experience.

While the dance is performed to music, this is only heard by the visitor through headphones. Ambient sound in the exhibition spaces comprises our breathing, movement of our feet and occasional speech. The experience of the work is completely altered according to which soundtrack is heard. With the headphones on, the dance is transformed, and the viewer enters the world of the dancers- emotional, internal, and driven by powerful pulses of sound and physical energy.

The part of the mind that is dark to us in this culture, that is sleeping in us, that we name ‘unconscious’, is the knowledge that we are inseparable from all other beings in the universe.  | Susan Griffin

Many thanks to

Christopher Boylan
Stuart Cameron
Neill Warhurst