Long Wave: Dance on Screen at The Place Theatre, London and selected for ‘Dance on Screen On Tour', Italy 2006; for Reeldance, Australia 2007 and reviewed in the Australian online journal Real Time Arts. Moebius: Video Dance 2007, Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece; 12th American Dance Festival, Durham, North Carolina, USA 2007; ScreenDance, Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Dance and Choreography in Richmond, Virginia 2007; Dança em foco, Festival Internacional de Vídeo & Dança, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2007; Open Source Video Dance 2007, Findhorn Scotland 2007; Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance, Goldsmith University, London 2007; Art Tech Media, Madrid Spain 2007; Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, Ammerman Centre, Connecticut, 2008; 4th International Dance Film Festival, Yokohama Zaim, Japan 2008; Montage Video Dance Festival, FNB Dance Umbrella, Johannesburg, South Africa 2008. Dança Sem Sombra 08, Lisabon Portugal; Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema 09, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado, US, 2009; international Video Festival, Le Breuil, Burgundy, France, 2009; Cinecity, Brighton 2009. Moebius was shown as video installation at Moves 08, MMU Manchester, April 08; PARK GALLERY, Falkirk Scotland 2009; WHAT If… Festival, Siobhan Davies Studio, London 2010.
My research as a performance artist includes choreography for camera. Drawing on a background in dance and the visual arts these projects challenge traditional modes of choreographic process and filmic representations. In contrast to much traditional dance and dance on screen where choreography is often developed from un-identified impulses this work aims to declare what motivates the movement. The work explores motion metaphorically and practically and visualises the individual as a composite of complex particular conditions and as a responsive live site within a constructed historical landscape.
The starting point for Moebius is archive footage of children playing with a giant ball. The ball causes the children to move while the children move the ball. The archive footage is projected onto a body to replay the dynamic of the game; the projected ball becomes the impulse for the body to move, while the body makes visible the images of the past.
The work takes its title from the moebius strip, a shape, which has only one side and one surface. Applied to the body the strip constitutes an alternative model to the traditional philosophical and psychoanalytical propositions for the body-mind, which tend to assume a binary construct of an inside and an outside. Such binaries seem inadequate to describe a Self that exists within a historical landscape and that contributes itself to the articulation and formation of its own past and present. Moebius explores the body-mind as an ongoing event, a unique and intimate dance between self and other, past and present, a continuous process always in the making.
Moebius was screened at the American Dance Festival 2007 within a programme that explored different choreographic approaches to the body as site and the body as tool. The same programme was presented by curator Douglas Rosenberg at Open Source Video Dance in Findhorn, Scotland. It was also selected for screening as part of Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance, a three day event exploring notion of Intimacy at Goldsmith University, London 2007.
A first one minute version was screened under the title Long Wave at Dance on Screen at The Place Theatre, London UK, and selected for ‘Dance on Screen On Tour', Italy 2006, as well as for Reeldance, Australia 2007.
"Claudia Kappenberg’s Long Wave (UK 2006) made use of archival footage projected on to the single female performer’s naked back. The simplicity and economy of the idea allowed access to an intimate world of texturally layered and body-based memory and association, with the undulatory movement of the figure echoing the journey of a giant sphere as it hugged the curve of a hip and rolled along the length of the spine."
(Down there for thinking, Real Time 77, Feb-March 2007, reviewed by Chirstinn Whyte)
