In her recent Foliage Chorus (2004), made for the opening of Artsdepot, a new art space in London, Jeyasingh uses dance and digital projection to animate a public space – the foyer and the balconies of the art centre – working with the notion of inside/outside and its inversion, with the idea of transparency resonating with the glass walls of the balconies, and with that of organic growth; hence, the name of the piece. Yet there are interesting discrepancies. For John Thornberry, the architect of Artsdepot, performance is effectively that of people entering and moving around the building and using it as a space for public and/or private consumption; for Jeyasingh, the performance is that of her group of dancers moving for an unsuspecting audience, half caught by surprise, half expecting the dance to begin as part of the event (the opening of the centre) and rushing to secure a good viewing location.
Slowly, sinuously, the dancers grow out of the building, flowing movements as if underwater, they twist and turn, shrinking and then growing. The specially mixed electronic soundscape and the growing digital frondescence creating a wintry, electric environment for the movement of dancing bodies.
On seeing the building in the summer of 2004, Jeyasingh could see the potential of using a balcony on the second floor for the first piece and the café area for the second piece. According to Jeyasingh, the architectural feature is a very strong starting point for making a piece of work. The unmoveable elements of the building were what she began with. In this case she was working on the balcony, which she felt was a “very bounded space”. Features of this balcony included a carpeted floor. A temporary wooden floor had to be built over this as the dancers would be dancing barefoot and would not be able to execute the movements on carpet. The transparent glass panels were a main feature - through which the audience would view the piece. An oak railing across the panels would cut the dancers bodies and Jeyasingh had to bear this in mind when making the movement. And finally, there was a rectangular-shaped, transparent window ledge on the wall at the back of the balcony (Coldman, 2005).
Jeyasingh was also struck by the light in the building, and the large amount of glass that was used in the whole building, which gave it a feeling of “letting the outside in and the inside out”. She had a feeling of transparency (in fact, the working title of the piece was Transparency), and a sense that there was no ending to the building – different
12perspectives gave you something else to look at (Coldman, 2005). She was very inspired by the building.
For Foliage Chorus, Jeyasingh’s initial thoughts were about the concept of transparency as a result of the design of the building. Eventually, her thoughts turned to plant life and the type of foliage that a building like the artsdepot would generate - “give birth to”. This notion of foliage is what Jeyasingh worked with through the piece. It determined the “dynamic of the movement”. She constantly had a picture of foliage moving slowly as if underwater. In fact, to her the balcony resembled a goldfish bowl through which the audience could see all the dancers – together – plant like. Hence the name Foliage Chorus (Coldman, 2005).
Eventually Jeyasingh and her dancers felt they could do no more in the studio and had to begin working on-site on the balcony itself. The piece really began to come together and was essentially made on the balcony. In a conventional theatre space, although the extreme boundaries of stage left or right may be of restricted viewing to some members of the audience, up, centre and down stage are in full view. This was not the case with the balcony space. Due to the audience’s perspective of the balcony from their vantage point below in the foyer area, the front part was very visible. People further back in the café area could also see the window ledge on the back wall. However, the floor at the back against the wall could only be visible to anyone looking at the balcony from the same or higher height. This meant that when the dancers fell to the floor at the back of the balcony the audience below could not see them. It was as if the floor was sloping towards the back wall. Jeyasingh discovered this during one of her rehearsals and found this to be a very exciting aspect. She used this quite a lot in the piece, making the dancers crawl right against the back wall and then appearing in different parts of the balcony (Coldman, 2005).
Jeyasingh technique of making the dancers fall to floor, roll around, crawl, goes back to her fascination with the floor. This is very apparent in Foliage Chorus, with dancers falling on the floor from the oak railing, rolling towards the back – as if going downhill, disappearing and then appearing again.
In the second piece of Foliage Chorus, the positions of the dancers and the audience was reversed – with the dancers performing in the foyer below and the audience watched from the balcony above. Because of the larger space that the dancers had, the dance movement was a lot less contained and there was a strong sense of release, with big movements, jumps and leaps. Where as the movement here seemed more three dimensional, the movement on the balcony was more one dimensional – flatter as it was only from the one perspective (Coldman, 2005).
http://www.rescen.net/Shobana_Jeyasingh/s_jeyasingh.html
http://www.sb-management.co.uk/documents/Looking%20at%20Dance%20-%20Shobana%20Jeyasingh's%20Foliage%20Chorus.pdf
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