You Move Me | Gemma Riggs, Laura Murphy & Melanie Wilson

About

You Move Me is a new audio-visual installation made by three artists of different disciplines in collaboration with the people in two different European towns; Žagarė, Lithuania, and Northampton, UK.

In each town, people were invited to take part in workshops with the artists, exploring ideas of everyday, gestural movements. Together they have created a new choreography, which has been performed and recorded in each participant’s own domestic setting. You Move Me is a meditation on gestural movement, portraiture and what it means to move together as a group. It is a celebration of people living in different geographical locations and how they are connected through movement. The work explores collective and individual identities, our quotidian actions and how we occupy our domestic spaces. It brings private identities into the public realm. The work is an inquiry into the idea of similarities and difference and the concept of synecdoche, which makes visible our idiosyncrasies by bringing similar elements together. Something unique and mesmerising happens when individuals move in unison; our attention is brought to the unique and distinctive nature of each person.

You Move Me extends from a wider body of work developed since 2013 by Laura Murphy and Gemma Riggs, whose collaborative research explores the framing of the moving body. The core artist team for You Move Me is formed of video artist Gemma Riggs, choreographer Laura Murphy and theatre maker and sound artist Melanie Wilson. They have been joined by a number of interdisciplinary collaborators including experimental psychologist Jorina Von Zimmerman who has helped them explore the concept of social synchrony and its implications from a behavioural perspective. Also contributing to the project are artist and writer Mary Paterson, artist and activist Susan Ryland as well as projection designer Richard Moores.

Northampton performers:
Ikran Abdile
Siobhan Auckland
Steve Banks
Merete Wells
Clare Moss
Victoria Whittaker

Žagarė performers:
Brigita Mitrikaite
Gabriele Mitrikaite
Edmundas Vaičiulis
Orinta Orlickienė
Benedikta McSharry
Židrija Janušaitė
Rita Plekaviciute

About the artists:

Melanie Wilson (sound artist, writer and performance maker) Melanie Wilson is an award-winning sound artist, writer and performance maker. Her work employs theatre, sound art, installation and contemporary forms of composition. Recent work includes Kingdom Come (RSC), Opera for the Unknown Woman (Cardiff Millennium Centre, Yorkshire International Festival and Platform Theatre, London); The Narrow World (a film made in Tunisia with Gemma Riggs), Landscape II (Dublin Fringe and U.K tour 2013-14); Autobiographer (Toynbee Studios, London and UK tour – winner of Off Westend Award for Best Sound Design); Iris Brunette (winner of Best Production award at Dublin Fringe); every minute, always (Edinburgh 2010, with Abigail Conway), Self Portrait with Frida (One on One Festival, BAC); The View From Here (One on One Festival, BAC) and Simple Girl (UK and international tour, Edinburgh Festival, Dublin Fringe).

Gemma Riggs (visual artist)
Gemma is a London-based artist who works across video, photography, installation and sound. Her work explores intensities of experience and the dialogue between the profound and the mundane, the internal and external. Gemma’s work has been shown internationally in exhibitions and festivals in Latvia, Romania, Ireland, Luxembourg and Lithuania. She has received multiple awards to produce original work from Arts Council England as well as research and travel awards from the British Council. She has a strong collaborative practice and has produced new works with with choreographers and performers including Cosmin Manolescu, Melanie Wilson and Laura Murphy.

Laura Murphy (choreographer)
Laura Murphy works internationally as a choreographer, performer and teacher. Her work includes large scale community dance and site specific professional ensembles, video installations and live staged works. Laura’s choreographic work has been shown in New York, Canada, Sweden, Romania, Iceland, China, U.K; Latvia; and at festivals such as the Biennale de Lyon, Reykjavik Dance Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Dublin Dance Festival and Cork Midsummer Festival. Her recent works include Abacus; at Dublin Fringe and Yellow; at Cork Midsummer Fest. She was awarded Best Movement Director by the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards 2017 for Whitby; at the Bram Stoker festival.

Collaborators: 

Jorina von Zimmermann (experimental psychologist)
Jorina von Zimmermann has recently completed her PhD in Social Psychology at University College London where she is now a Research Associate in the department of Experimental Psychology. During her PhD, Jorina studied how synchronous behaviour in groups of people increases cohesion between them. In her research more generally, Jorina focuses on group cohesion, how it emerges and which positive and negative consequences it has for intragroup as well as intergroup relations. Jorina strongly believes that science should be taken out of the lab as often as possible and it is one of her aims to apply (her) research findings to real-world scenarios.

Susan Ryland (artist and activist)
Susan Ryland is a practicing artist, researcher, lecturer and political activist. She creates site and event specific multimedia artworks that explore the interaction between text and visual language. Her research interest draws on cognitive linguistics to show how an understanding of thought mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche enable us to interpret meaning both ‘held within’, and ‘created by’ processes, materials, objects, language and context in artworks. Susan lectures in Creativity and Cognition within Higher Education. She is a Green Party activist seeking common ground across the ‘progressive’ political spectrum to achieve a more equal, sustainable and democratic society.

Mary Paterson (writer / curator)
Mary Paterson is a writer and curator who works between performance, poetry and visual art. Based in London, she collaborates with artists around the world to explore the materiality of language as, from and about art. Recent commissions include Taking Writing for a Walk; for Live Art DK (Copenhagen, 2014), A Travelling Lighthouse; for Wellcome Collection (London, 2015) and Aftermath; for Fabrica and TAP (Brighton and international, 2015). Mary was (2017) Bristol Art Writer in Residence for the Art Writers Group, working with Spike Island and Arnolfini on a new installation that explores the histories of immigration. Mary regularly writes about art, academia and audiences; she was recently guest editor of a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (Taylor and Francis, 2016), and her chapter It Moves; will be published in The Creative Critic (Routledge) later this year.

For more information about You Move Me visit www.youmoveme.co.uk

You Move Me has been commissioned by NN Contemporary Art and developed by Gemma Riggs. It has been supported using public funds from Arts Council England.

The artists are grateful for the support given from the following organisations and their teams:
Gabriela Tudor Foundation (Romania)
Žagarė Fringe Festival (Lithuania)
Arts Council England (UK)
Thanks also to Ugnius Stenianskis, Jeremy Nicholls, Matthew De Pulford, Catherine Herbert, Esther Collins, Dimity Nicholls, Cosmin Manolescu and Stefania Ferchedau.