Parting
Sunday 16 March 2014, 4pm, Hall Two
Exhibited/performed at Kings Place London
Tickets can be booked here.
A work made in collaboration with composers Litha and Effy Efthymiou is part of a multi-event, multi-disciplinary show that creates a ‘living-through’ experience of psychosis. Within the Efthymiou’s theme, each ‘installation’ lifts the main character (be it a dancer, musician or actor) out of their everyday life and examines the very nature of their hallucination or delusion.
Julie Groves’ element of the collage-work (which sits in the context of other ‘vignettes’) explores both the performer’s body, the physical surroundings of the performer’s tactile score and the inter-relation between the sound and the physical towards an expression of a psychosis. This is the first work in which Julie has fused her practice as a classical and contemporary musician with her creative sound art practice. This work enables her to use her physical composition within a performative theatre context in a collaborative situation.
Sensingsite – with the Parasol Unit
Wednesday 9th April 2014
University of Falmouth, Cornwall
A performance presentation paper which looks at the interrelation between Julie’s practice-based PhD research and the theme of the Sensingsite remit – Performing Site
ABSTRACT -
‘ ‘Sense, sensation and the sensitive’ - Transformative Sites: composing with the physical.
This performance-presentation will interrogate the notion of site specifically in terms of the body, exploring the body as transformative site with particular attention to the specific moment between sensing and comprehension.
Between the act of sensing and the moment of comprehending is the point at which I contend that my experience has been ‘composed by the physical’. This paper will focus on how the body’s (and therefore the mind’s) experience is shaped by the physical, and in this way I will give an articulation of the physical as a manipulable compositional element.
I contend that the very act of sensing site is ultimately based in a physical interaction of the senses with the encountered. In those first moments, before anything else, we must perceive it with our very bodies: let the sound drain into our ears, the resonance of site beat gently about our skins and accumulate a myriad spectrum of sensed-signals in light, touch, smell and sound. Only after that fragmentary moment of first encounter can we then begin to make sense of sensation. After that, we make decisions, reason with the sensed and come to conclusions about site and its meaning or subjective significance.
Site itself can be any manner of things: an imaginary space; a mountainous Scottish landscape; a bedroom; the space inside that shoebox at the back of a wardrobe. It is designated by our own limitations upon it, and it is omnipresent and ubiquitous. It is what you perceive it to be and it is undeniably the means of sensing the world about you. The way we perform a site, and more importantly how it allows us to perform it, is the kernel- point of its communication. It is where the communication begins. Performing site is how we glean an understanding. The site I carefully create as an artist is my tool, the same as a poet’s lexicon.
This Sensingsite performance-presentation will see the physical-as-site and the body ‘composed by the physical’ in direct relation to my PhD practice-research into the proposed field of Physical Composition: An immersive and participatory performance- presentation stemming from a personal creative sound art practice that intuitively utilizes physical elements as compositional process. In exploring notions of audience-ship, performance and physical tangibility, this performance-presentation pays particular attention to the agency of the body and subjectivity.’