Skip to navigation | Skip to main content | Skip to footer

Please note...


This page is no longer live and exists only for reference purposes, for this reason the content here may be out of date.

If you are looking for something specific at the Whitworth try using our site search




Siobhan Davies Dance: material / rearranged / to / be

London-based investigative arts organisation Siobhan Davies Dance show an ambitious new installation...

Siobhan Davies Dance: Material / Rearranged / To / Be

Exploring our bodies' capacity to communicate, the work includes performance, film projection, and sculptural objects that are presented as an ever-changing arrangement. Visitors enter the gallery and are immersed in a live environment that evolves around them.

Artist Jeremy Millar provides a structure and concept for the work inspired by the practices of the art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg collected diverse images of human gestures and poses from different times and places, positioning them side by side to allow new relationships to emerge, and explore how meanings are constituted by the movement of imagery across time and space. In a similar spirit, Material / Rarranged / To / Be presents a large-scale, modular architecture which is continually arranged and rearranged by the artists, creating new pathways through the installation and drawing visitors into a journey of discovery.
 
The artists and choreographers in Material / Rearranged / To / Be have combined Warburg’s ideas on bodily communication with the latest research in neuroscience to investigate how movement is felt, observed, and we reveal and conceal thought in physical behaviour.
 
Works include choreographies on concepts of instability and disorientation, how we archive or remember past movement, along with a taxonomy of imaginary actions. Performers engage directly with the public inviting them to participate in the aggressive bodily postures and rhythms associated with argument, or to think about how we feel in relation to the actions of another through everyday activities like shaking hands. A looped video projection that oscillates in the space between live movement and recorded image highlights how our embodied intelligence anticipates future events.

6-14 May

Exhibition performance times:

Saturday 6 to Wednesday 10 May: 10am-4pm 

Thursday 11 May: 10am-1pm (no performances 1pm-5pm), Thursday Lates: 5pm-8pm

Friday 12 to Sunday 14 May: 10am–4pm


After the Whitworth, the installation will tour to the Bluecoat, Liverpool. For more information visit Siobhan Davies Dance.
With thanks to generous support from Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation.
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Presented in collaboration with Tramway.

Image: Loop Atlas by Matthias Sperling part of material / rearranged / to / be (2017) by Siobhan Davies Dance. Photo by Pari Naderi.