Art

The following is an extensive email conversation, which happened over a period of time between Garry Stewart and Ian Gibbins during the preparation of ‘Proximity‘. It will give you an idea of the depth of research that Garry delves into for his work on any particular subject. It really shows that contemporary dance can be the thinking person’s art form as well as satisfying the draw of physical expression and virtuosity. 

Q. I’m wondering if you could say that ‘when we see we do it with our entire body, not just our eyes and brain’.

A. I think the purists would not like to say “see” but certainly “perceive” would be well accepted. There is no doubt that how we visually perceive the world around us is influenced by our prior knowledge and / or expectations of the things we see. In terms of the “entire body”, something that is so intrinsic to us it is generally taken for granted, is that we perceive the world and its objects necessarily adjusted for our body scale: how big we are compared to everything else. This determines how we interact with things at various distances from us, how we judge … Click here for more.

Ian has been fortunate to have collaborated with Garry Stewart and Australian Dance Theatre on two of their productions: Be Your Self (2010) and Proximity (2012), each of which premiered at the corresponding Adelaide Festival and then toured extensively overseas.

Garry Stewart’s Be Your Self reveals the precarious stability of the concept of self as the work steps through the conventions we use to construct a singular and consistent notion of ‘I’. In an analysis of selfhood, Stewart situates the body at the centre of his inquiry. In Be Your Self the Australian Dance Theatre dancers are transformed into erupting, powerful, creative entities projecting a plethora of physical images and impressions set to an unpredictable, cartoonish, electronic score.

In Proximity Garry Stewart and Paris-based video engineer Thomas Pachoud (with the support of didascalie.net) worked in collaboration to create a dialogue for dance and real-time video manipulation. The work is primarily an investigation into the body’s interactive participation in the act seeing the world with reference to neurological body maps and the French philosopher Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.

In each case, Ian provided text that was used in the production. In addition, he ran workshops for the dancers that explored … Click here for more.