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Inbetween Time 2006

february 1-5 2006


 Da Contents H2

February 3 2006
Duncan Speakman: Echo Location
Osunwunmi

Gob Squad: Managing fear
Winnie Love

Gob Squad: What does it mean to be a Vampire?
Niki Russell at the Gob Squad lecture

John Gillies: A Geography of Longing and Belonging
Marie-Anne Mancio

John Gillies: Old land, new testament
Ruth Holdsworth

Rosie Dennis: One from the heart
Winnie Love in the Rosie Dennis loop

Uninvited Guests: The art of wounding
Marie-Anne Mancio faces up to Univited Guests

February 2 2006
AC Dickson: Rising up to the challenge of his rivals
Niki Russell on eBay selling as performance

Bodies in Flight: And the word was made flesh
Osunwunmi

Carolyn Wright: Conversational miscues
When Winnie Love met Carolyn Wright

Carolyn Wright: Pleased to meet you, again
Niki Russell

David Weber-Krebs: Beyond waiting
Winnie Love

David Weber-Krebs: More than it says it is…
Ruth Holdsworth

David Weber-Krebs: Risk realised
Virginia Baxter

 

Rosie Dennis: One from the heart

Winnie Love in the Rosie Dennis loop

Winnie Love is a Bristol-based artist working with performance, film and video.

Rosie Dennis, Love Song Dedication Rosie Dennis, Love Song Dedication
Standing in a spotlight at the front of the stage wearing a green summer dress, Rosie Dennis uses her arms to pull into herself the recollection of past lovers. Recounting in a numerical sequence elements of relationships, she plays her breath like a musician, making staccato, stilted, percussive sounds. Modulating phrases to replay and explore all the possible angles on a past event, she holds in repeated gestures a lost lover’s body. As a soundtrack to these memories there are sweet, quirky songs.

If asked (outside this inside space) “How are you?” Dennis might say, “Oh okay you know” while whirring away inside is a jarring mechanism replaying regrets. In Love Song Dedication we see the inside, the unstoppable recollections. We are, for an intense 20 minutes, completely with her, breathing in with her the compulsive loop of recall. The performance is electric, its tautness sustaining our focus; there is no time or space to detach. Although not manic the performer endures attacks of panic like those dark episodes that appear in the cold sleepless hours. Some of the movements recalled for me a forgotten mechanism playing out a hapless sequence, like a damaged forsaken mechanical monkey. I saw raw representations of scattered recall, inducing states of near hyperventilation.

In spite of all this angst Dennis is funny, the audience appreciating the ridiculous fragments spilling forth—“I’m sorry I left you at the airport, on purpose”—bright evocative one-line pictures keep coming at breathtaking speed. Forlorn images express the failure to maintain a state of love.

It all happens right up on the front of the stage. Dennis is a very open performer without distracting attitude, sentiment or theories. The work was palpably female in its multitudinous attempts to explain what went wrong, and in the recognition that often saying sorry can be and can sound so feeble.

Rosie Dennis is a Sydney-based improvising vocalist, poet and performer.




Rosie Dennis, Love Song Dedication; The Cube, Feb 3

Winnie Love is a Bristol-based artist working with performance, film and video.

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006

© Winnie Love; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]

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