Transmission | Tuning the Body: scores for attempted connections

Patricia and Cleo’s performance is an experimental performance lecture that brings together dance, text and performance scores to frame a series of explorations into ephemerality, methods of transmission and shared practice. Working from an ongoing appreciation for dance pioneer Trisha Brown and her seminal work Locus (1975), Patricia Wood and Cleo Mees will attempt to experiment with representation, place and gesture by building a shared embodied language in the ephemeral performance context of live performance.

This performance lecture builds on a deep investigation into memory, embodiment and re-enactment. It incorporates radio transmission as a source of poetics, and to explore the poetic resonances between the two ephemeral forms of dance and radio. Through enlisting choreographic and text based scores and improvisational frameworks, it will attempt to transmit into the aether: to transmit dance across time and space and social memory.

As Patricia Wood and Cleo Mees enact these attempts on stage, they engage with the question of what it means to work in some sort of relation to the people they admire, and the people who have made work before them. What gets lost in transit, what is new, what is changed as a particular practice or dance is sent through time, space, and bodies?

Their performance lecture centers around, and loves, the attempt. The attempt, for example, to send dance through the radio into the air. Scores and text provide a sense of what is being attempted in a performance, and remind us that so much of the joy or meaning of a performance (or of any artwork) can reside in its scores, and in what it tries to do.