The paper was entitled ‘Does Screendance need to look like Dance?’, and proposes a map for Screendance that draws on a wide range of roots including auteur cinema, video art and anthropologically informed art practices. At the festival Claudia also curated a screening combining works from the field of Screendance and video art under the title ‘Paradoxical Bodies’.In July 08 Claudia devised two performances for a group of students from the Dance and Visual Art Pathway; ‘Extreme Ironing’, performed at Brighton Station as part of the Soundwaves Festival. It is an absurd but probable ritual of collecting and ironing discarded newspapers from the commuter trains and offering them to passers-by and travellers.
‘Upon the Place Beneath’, a site-specific performance for the canteen of the UoB, was shown as part of Scratch the Surface. The project explored a painterly sensibility and working methods; six female bodies were placed within a conglomeration of materials comprised of beans, peas and grains, hats, buckets, water and different kinds of vessels. With an oblique approach to movement and sound, a soundscape was produced as part of a process of moving, while the movement was part of a process of producing sound. A physical kind of poetry ensued, an insistence on the almost nothing.
In July Claudia Kappenberg also collaborated with Munich-based artists on an Internet streaming event and was invited to perform as part of an exhibition entitled Forest Art Path in August, a biennial event in the forest of Darmstadt, Germany. This included a two-week residency to develop the work on site as well as two weekends of performances in the forest. Claudia showed a new work entitled ‘Bread Tools and Mittens’, which is part of an ongoing research project by which work processes of the everyday are displaced and subverted through a performance practice and its documents. It follows on from the work ‘Extreme Ironing’, 2007/8, and further questions society’s imperative on the individual to be productive. In the performance a body with two loaves for mittens is set against objects that are moulded out of dough and resemble tools. Neither hands nor tools can act. The work was conceived for the exhibition’s theme of “Systems and Cycles”, and the bread tools were given to the inhabitants of the forest (wild pigs) at the end of the exhibition.
The summer concluded with a one-month residency and bursary at Villa Waldberta, Munich, Germany, in September.
