In a Winter Garden

間

Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space“. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form“… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.

Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon, 2001) p 370.

The collaboration investigates the shared signature elements of Will Clift’s large-scale sculptures, Diane Frank’s site-specific choreography, and Jarek Kapuściński’s music: intervals of balance, imbalance, and breathed connection within an ever-shifting environment. The performance explores Japanese aesthetics, particularly the Japanese concept of “ma”, a breath-related sense of interval in time and space. Both sculpture and movement unfold within an enveloping ever-changing sonic environment. The winter sounds incorporated in the score were recorded by Japanese environmental sound artist Nao Nishahara in the Tohoku region of Japan after the tsunami. Japanese musician Ko Ishikawa, a master of the “shō”, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, play in live performance. Seven dancers explore the possibilities within a landscape of interlocking sculptural forms, not merely moving through it but actively creating and changing the sculptural elements in relation to the space, both configuring and traversing the permutations of that sculptural and sonic world.