STUCK

STUCK is a Dance Theatre Piece; a collaboration between Julia Griffin (Choreographer and Live Performer), Professor Stephen Davismoon (Composer, Sound Designer and Live Sound Performer) and Professor Helen Newall (Images and Projections). It takes as its central themes for each of the authors a lamentation of the loss of memory and identity through Dementia. All of its sounds in the soundscape are derived from the movement of Julia's body: arms, legs, feet and hands as well as the sounds of her breathing as she moved through, often getting 'Stuck' various states. In live performance Davis follows her every movement and arc, diffusing the sound live, in a quasi-improvised way, across an array of 8 loudspeakers allowing for often granular dispersal of the sound. For each artist this work is centred upon memory and identity: what more fundamental 'sound mark' for any of us is there other than that emanating from our body and its breathing? The multilayered projections by Helen Newall using text selected from Julia's account of her mother's loss of identity, bring an extraordinarily haunting perspective to the work. Using kinetic typography, the investigative aim was to find a way of visually representing the erosion of verbal language fluency and language confusion experienced by some sufferers of dementia, alongside their loss of identity and memory, and reflected Newall's own experiences of her father's aphasic dementia.

'STUCK' was performed on 17th and 28th June 2017 at Edge Hill University's Resonant Edge Festival and Festival of Ideas, and was then subsequently installed and performed for psychiatric intensive care unit staff at Callington Road Hospital, Bristol.