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WHO: CAROL BROWN DANCES
WHAT: THE CHANGING ROOM
WHEN: THU 4 – SAT 6 OCT
WHERE: GREENWICH DANCE AGENCY
TICKETS: 020 8293 9741

The Changing Room is an intimate exploration of our digital evolution. Set within a specially developed interactive room which offers the audience multiple viewpoints, three performers are confronted by a place where everyday familiarity is undone. Embedded within the furniture of the room is a series of screens through which a haunting virtual presence is rendered, mirroring, extending and distorting the dancers' behaviour. By interacting with these evocative images they inhabit unfamiliar and strange dimensions, animating the threshold between the virtual and the real.

The Changing Room is a collaboration between choreographer Carol Brown and architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. Carol Brown Dances last appeared in Dance Umbrella in 2002 with Nerve and in 2001 with Machine for Living. Brown is renowned for her cross-art form collaborations with visual artists, photographers, filmmakers, architects and sound designers. Carol Brown is currently a NESTA Dream Time Fellow and her awards include a 1999 Jerwood Choreography Award and the 2004 Ludwig Forum Prize for Innovation.


"The neatest possible justification of live art; life simply being turned into art."
The Guardian


Fri 5 Nov
MEET THE ARTIST
Free to ticket holders after the performance.

<small>[ 29 September 2004, 08:12 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Carol Brown Dances
The Changing Room
Greenwich Dance Agency
Saturday 06/11/04

Carol Brown’s latest work ‘The Changing Room’ is not just simply a dance piece it is a performance event. Before entering the auditorium on Saturday night the audience was told that there would be no fixed seating but that we would be guided to move around the event and would be able to stand or sit as long as we did not obstruct the view of others. In fact we ended up making our way once all the way around the performance space which had two separate layers of a see-through material on side and a black backdrop in a 90-degree angle.

The performance began with an anatomical lecture style monologue given by one of
the dancers while standing over her partner who moved her limbs while lying on a table. I have to admit that at this point I started to worry about the rest of the evening but I was pleasantly surprised when the 3 dancers Carol Brown, Catherine Bennett and Delphine Gaborit started moving to a score by Jerome Soudan. In one section of
the piece they tried on various costume pieces made of white stretch material with which they then covered arms, hands, faces or legs creating distorted images in the process. This was followed by another slightly weird lecture about the evolutionary interface between technology and biology posing the question ‘…why can I not wriggle my nose like Samantha in ‘Bewitched’ and make the most amazing things happen that way?

I very much preferred the parts without speech that allowed me to concentrate on the remarkable fluidity of the 3 dancers as they moved through a series of solos, duos and ensemble sections, sometimes seemingly interacting with sci-fi style digital projections. ‘The Changing Room’ is a collaboration between choreographer Carol Brown and architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. The visual effects are quite stunning and at times give the impression of completely drawing the dancers into an unreal virtual world. I was unlucky on one occasion with the viewing angle I had picked and ended up having a light source shinning into my eyes from one side. This had not been foreseeable while the audience settled down. Apart from that I found the piece really absorbing and had a feeling of coming back to the surface at the end of the performance as if I had been diving into a different world.