Kirsten Adkins

The title Force describes an exploratory series of ‘self defence’ dance films that work both separately and in collaboration with one another. They have been installed and presented in various exhibition spaces, working together in different ways with each curation.

The series comprises the following dance films that follow:

Chancery Against Low Frontal Attack (excerpt), Stand Up Get Down and Grab First Grip Firmly (looped projection)

Force is curated as a multi channel installation. The sound is minimal but repeated rhythm created from the natural sounds of breath and footfall and auditory utterances of force and exertion within the studio environment.

Chancery Against Low Frontal Attack is a durational performance and a film which considers the dynamics of care and harm, strength and vulnerability. The repeated looped actions of the male and female performers are inspired by a military training film in which soldiers step through imaginary hand to hand combat scenario’s. The dance is performed as a game in which each participant takes turns to carefully throw the other to the ground. They need to overpower their opponent while protecting one another from injury and the hard concrete floor. The film challenges masculine and feminine behaviours as the dancers appear to simultaneously bestow physical aggression and nurturing love upon one another. The sequence speeds up until the instructions start to disintegrate and the movements become either flowing and repetitive or broken and disjointed.  A sense the body coming in and out of focus, leaving and re-entering the frame and movements becoming imperceptible to the eye. In a similar way roles of attack and defence become increasingly unstable. Chancery Against Low Frontal Attack was also a 17 minutes endurance performance which I recorded and screened in Hong Kong in November 2018. This installation responds to themes discussed in Simone Weil’s 1941 essay The Iliad or Poem of Force using gesture, repetition and cyclical movements. In her critique of violence after the fall of France in 1940, the religious and cultural theorist described violence in terms of a force, ‘that x that turns the body into a thing’.  For Weil, force is unequivocal and indiscriminate in its impact on the body; it ultimately obliterates all who are touched by it.

Stand Up Get Down is a dance film which draws on an formalised rituals and processes. It isolates gestural movement performed to a click track; hinted at sounds of explosion, gun-loading, drill and sneaking up on the enemy. Dancers respond to archive and contemporary military promotion advertisements, in which soldiers are instructed in how to attack and defend. Performers enact aggressive and defensive postures adopting a blend of sharply punctuated and flowing, slowed down movements that contain elements of of strength, force and precision.  There is a variation of pace, speed and time.  Two dancers break down the movement, slowing the action and holding poses. In this way the film can be seen as a series of close studies of the body in its movement from strength to vulnerability, from the upright and alert to stealth to hiding to taking cover and seeking protection. By working with these broken down and isolated movements I am able to look at the contradictory messages contained within ritualised performed military manoeuvres.

Grab First Grip Firmly emerged out of a devised movement piece created in collaboration with the Lisa Cleaver. It is performed as a game between two players. Player 1 is instructed to grab first. Player 2 is instructed to grip firmly. Neither player knows what the other is trying to do. Neither really understands what they are doing themselves. They don’t know when to stop and they don’t know how to win. This looped sequence plays on the ambiguities of the adversarial encounter. There is aggression in this playful exchange, but the violence can be found in the exertion of both bodies. The dominant force is therefore found outside of or beyond the control of the combatants.