Inscription
Movement is human experience.
We meet each other first as bodies in motion, and meaning emerges and is enacted from this kinetic life we carry.
Inscription is a stage composition for sound, kinetic sculptures, light and human performer. Performer Alwynne Pritchard shares the stage with a constellation of non-representational kinetic sculptures. Skeletal, self-illuminating figures whose movements at times embody hers, drawn from high-resolution motion capture: her acceleration, her hesitation, her weight.
At other moments, the sculptures move with their own mechanical logic, asserting a presence that is theirs alone. Between performer and sculptures, a tension of alignment and divergence unfolds, of embodiment and estrangement. As they move, the lights they carry throw shifting shadows across the theatrical space, extending the figures beyond themselves; a composed score moves with and against them.
They are disembodied prosthetics distributing the performer’s movement patterns into morphologically other bodies.
Familiar yet strange.
Human yet patently not.
Their refusal of resemblance is deliberate. Without faces to read, without limbs that echo our own, without the symmetry of biological bodies, the sculptures are, in a sense, defined by what they lack: they offer no visual shortcuts into the ready categories of creature, machine, or character. In that absence, perception must become active. Each onlooker brings their own kinaesthetic memory, their own embodied knowledge of effort and intent, to meet what appears on stage.
Out of this imaginative labour, something more precarious may emerge over the course of the performance: a sense of kinship between human and non-human presence. Not inferring that the sculptures are alive or conscious, but an affective state in which the categorical distinction between self and other becomes, for a moment, less rigid. A pre-reflective bodily resonance with the movement itself, partially bypassing cognitive evaluation: I feel they have intent but know they have not. The body responds as to another intentional being even as we know these are mechanical assemblages executing instructions. This tension is not a contradiction to be resolved but the very fabric of the work: a felt relation that coexists with an awareness of its own impossibility.
Inscription is part of the research project Movement, Mimesis and Mimicry at the Research Institute, University of the Arts Helsinki, and is produced by Uniarts Helsinki and Neither Nor(Norway).
Working group
- Kinetic figures/composition/sound design/movement development/systems development: Thorolf Thuestad
- Physical performance/movement development/text/voice: Alwynne Pritchard
- Lights: Anna Rouhu
Supported by Uniarts Helsinki, The Municipality of Bergen – Norway, Arts Council Norway, The Norwegian Composers Fund and Fond for Lyd og Bilde – Norway.
Inscription is a stage composition for sound, kinetic sculptures, light and human performer. Performer Alwynne Pritchard shares the stage with a constellation of non-representational kinetic sculptures. Skeletal, self-illuminating figures whose movements at times embody hers, drawn from high-resolution motion capture: her acceleration, her hesitation, her weight.
At other moments, the sculptures move with their own mechanical logic, asserting a presence that is theirs alone. Between performer and sculptures, a tension of alignment and divergence unfolds, of embodiment and estrangement. As they move, the lights they carry throw shifting shadows across the theatrical space, extending the figures beyond themselves; a composed score moves with and against them.
They are disembodied prosthetics distributing the performer’s movement patterns into morphologically other bodies.
Familiar yet strange.
Human yet patently not.
Their refusal of resemblance is deliberate. Without faces to read, without limbs that echo our own, without the symmetry of biological bodies, the sculptures are, in a sense, defined by what they lack: they offer no visual shortcuts into the ready categories of creature, machine, or character. In that absence, perception must become active. Each onlooker brings their own kinaesthetic memory, their own embodied knowledge of effort and intent, to meet what appears on stage.
Out of this imaginative labour, something more precarious may emerge over the course of the performance: a sense of kinship between human and non-human presence. Not inferring that the sculptures are alive or conscious, but an affective state in which the categorical distinction between self and other becomes, for a moment, less rigid. A pre-reflective bodily resonance with the movement itself, partially bypassing cognitive evaluation: I feel they have intent but know they have not. The body responds as to another intentional being even as we know these are mechanical assemblages executing instructions. This tension is not a contradiction to be resolved but the very fabric of the work: a felt relation that coexists with an awareness of its own impossibility.
Inscription is part of the research project Movement, Mimesis and Mimicry at the Research Institute, University of the Arts Helsinki, and is produced by Uniarts Helsinki and Neither Nor(Norway).
Working group
- Kinetic figures/composition/sound design/movement development/systems development: Thorolf Thuestad
- Physical performance/movement development/text/voice: Alwynne Pritchard
- Lights: Anna Rouhu
Supported by Uniarts Helsinki, The Municipality of Bergen – Norway, Arts Council Norway, The Norwegian Composers Fund and Fond for Lyd og Bilde – Norway.