Julie is currently researching the processes of what she has termed Physical Composition. Her creative practice explores manners of employing the technique as a primary building-block.
Current works at varying stages of the creative process are as follows. Most remain untitled as yet, the clarity of their identity coming in the final stages. This page serves almost as a workbook for those interested in what she is thinking and working on at this precise moment in time:
Parting (2014) – to be exhibited and performed at Kings Place on Sunday 16 March 2014, 4pm
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.
Julie will be in the workshop devising and creating her installation in the coming months.
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Letters (working title) is a work that takes place across months, possibly years. The slow unfolding of the work is part of its identity. Based around correspondence by letter, it explores the status of audience-ship; and reciprocally also performance. It plays with the roles of both the sender and the receiver: the receiver/audience becomes the performer of the received and also the performer of their projected response, both participants’ roles continually reversing and turning each time a letter-event takes place. This is a work made with poet Andy Spragg in which both artists retain their own discipline, exploring the consequences of their work when it ‘hits’ the other paradigm. Julie is sending her physical compositions to which Andy responds likewise with his writing.
Letters 1 2014 (working title)
Letters 1 2014 (working title)
Letters 1 2014 (working title)
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Peacock (working title) is a creative practice manifestation of the research that Julie is doing into the role and recognition of the body in shaping our perception of a work and our experience and understanding of meaning. In its early stages, the work looks at what happen when we become aware of our bodies when we are ‘an audience’. The audience usually remains incognito – we usually pass unnoticed against the action that we are there to witness, whether it be theatre or art exhibition. It is a private and passive experience: we receive. This work explores what happens when we become evident in the mix and enables the audience to become contextually aware of their own body as part of their audience-experience. We like to leave our bodies out of the equation, even though they are the way we perceive everything about us: our main source of understanding. We prefer to imagine ourselves as a floating brain that collects the information from around us cerebrally. Peacock makes a performer of it’s audience. In donning a large, fanned tail (of which there is one, or maximum two to be worn), the audience conducts their viewing of the rest of an exhibition with an awareness of the sound they make with the movement of their body through space; an awareness of their body ‘with them’ at all times; and an awareness of the audience as part of the event taking place, invisibility stripped away.
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