Basement Dances - no movement is too small
Video installation, Elector Studios Project Space, St Leonards-on-Sea April 2025
Movement Tableau 1# Hoops, performer Liz Aggiss
Movement Tableau 3# Falling and Rising, Performers Meghan Flanigan, Anthony O’Flaherty, Thomas Kampe, Claudia Kappenberg, Rebecca Skelton
‘no movement is too small’
An installation which facilitates the movement of memory.
Bodies in movement make up this collection of archival objects, conjured through the moving image and echoing another time and place. Grainy video images reveal the instances when bodies reach out, reach across, sense and surrender, re-presented some thirty years later. As one hand touches another body, as a body gives in to weight, as a figure falls away from her shadow, so the past touches, gives way or merges with the present. A dance of relations and being in relation.
The collection is part of the legacy of Austrian Jewish choreographer Hilde Holger (Vienna 1905 – London 2001), whose story is informed by the Viennese Avant-Garde of the 1920s, Nazi persecution and refuge in Bombay, the partition of India as well as fifty years of pedagogy and inclusive dance innovation in the UK. For Holger, dance was the means to feel common ground and to conjure possibilities wherever she was.
The exhibition was generously supported by @homeliveart and @colin_booth at @electro_studios-project_space.
Performers: Liz Aggiss, Carol Brown, Meghan Flanigan, Anthony O’Flaherty, Thomas Kampe, Claudia Kappenberg, Rebecca Skelton, Philip Smith
Video camera (1992/93) Claudia Kappenberg, Thomas Kampe, Anthony O’Flaherty
Video editing (2024/25) Claudia Kappenberg
Installation stills Nicole Zaaroura, Claudia Kappenberg
Electro Studios Project Space, 5/6 April 2025, St-Leonards-on-Sea UK