Materiality Will Be Rethought

About

Joe Moran/ Dance Art Foundation  

Materiality Will Be Rethought 

Artist and choreographer Joe Moran present a new performance commission conceived in dialogue with Carlos Bunga’s exhibition Something Necessary and Useful, (on display 21 Jan – 6 Sep 2020, Whitechapel Gallery).  

Conceived as a site-specific work, Materiality Will Be Rethought was developed as a live performance within sculptural environment, but has been reimagined as a film due to Covid-19 restrictions, with funding support from Arts Council England Emergency Relief Fund.

The piece navigates dance’s potential to animate and disrupt architectural space, the physicality of the dancer’s voice and the moving body as a site of political unrest and complex subjectivities. Moran’s choreography offers new contextual frameworks within which Something Necessary and Useful can be experienced. In turn the sculptural environment created by Bunga creates a space of friction, interrogated by the present bodies of dancers with whom Moran works. The title Materiality Will Be Rethought is taken from an extract of a text from Judith Butler’s book Bodies that Matter: Discursive Limits of Sex.  

While the work cannot meet a live audience due to Covid-19, the film takes the opportunity to develop a new framework for the commission developed in collaboration with cinematographer Alana Mejía González (Sophia Al Maria) and artist moving image editor Sue Giovanni (Rose English; Jananne Al-Ani).

Beyond simply the documentation of a performance, the film conveys the tensions and physicality of the relationship between choreography and its structural environment. A spacious tone and architectural eye operates in counterpoint to a focus on the physicality and physical urgency of the performance. The piece combines movement with voice elements, which serve as a device to approximate the agency and power of a performer, refuting the spectre of the voiceless silenced dancer. 

The film launches on Thursday 3 December at 7pm with a Q&A featuring Joe Moran and dancers Temi Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes, Sean Murray and Eve Stainton in conversation with Whitechapel Curator of Public Programmes Jane Scarth. Following the premiere, the film will be available to view until Thursday 17 December via the Whitechapel Gallery’s website.

This is Joe Moran’s first commission with Whitechapel Gallery having previously presented the solo work Indefinite Article for Raising Dust, a day of performance speculating on the bridges between photographic and performative practice performance within the exhibition A Handful of Dust, curated by David Campany. Moran is the Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation through which his performance and curatorial work is produced, having recently performed works at Sadler’s Wells, Nottingham Contemporary and The Lowry, and worked internationally as a dancer with choreographers Deborah Hay (USA), Stina Nyberg (Sweden) and Siobhan Davies (UK) amongst others