Let Different Kinds of Bodies Slow You Down - She (ila) Gilbert in Constants by Bodies in Flight (1998).
I have been thinking about how different kinds of performers create spaces for stillness. My thoughts turn to Shela Gilbert, a performer I have worked with in a couple of Bodies in Flight shows. I think about Constants (a show concerned with memory and I feel nostalgic.The palpable presence of Sheila (a performer in her mid seventies) is my own overarching memory of this show: as I close my eyes I can still sense her. The frailty of her body, now more present than ever, a body beginning to fail. I note that I feel an acute awareness of my own body as I watch others.
Constants was named, was framed as a proximity work and the audience were placed on chairs in a spiral within the action. Implicated, as part of it.
She, as she likes to be called, begins and circles around us, casting huge shadows on the walls. She uses the walls and the backs of the audiences’ chairs for support.
The younger woman, Patricia skates in-between obliging us to choose where to look and even whether we will indeed move ourselves - to turn to see. She(ila)’s coming at us, from behind. Anti-clockwise. Against the flow. We catch glimpses. Watching through others, the others in our sight line. Being part of.
How near? How far? Right or left? In what relationship to me, to my body, in what kind of orientation?
And the monochrome of the 6 small video monitors arranged about the space. Hunks of metal amongst this flesh.
She(ila)’s on the move again, inwards.
Patricia moving quickly, jerkily, and fairly constantly.
In Dionysian bursts, explosions of energy – exorcising, expulsing, casting off.
Disobeying the borders.
She(ila) now travels in-between and we can see ourselves in the monitors caught in the action rather than deliberately framed.
Images and sounds captured and archived, ghosting through.
Thoughts of the absent other.
And far too much presence.
And then a cacophony of colour and a crazy babble through the monitors.
And quiet.
She’s reached the dead centre.
All that and then this stillness.
www.bodiesinflight.co.uk
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