Monstrous Body by Gravity Feed 2004

05 Aug 2004 : The Performance Space, (old venue) 199 Cleveland Street, Redfern, Sydney, Australia

Monstrous Body was Gravity Feed’s final and most ambitious work. In this project the performers and audience alike were consumed entirely by the construction. An insurmountable and ambiguous spatial structure in which visitors could not understand whether they were being expelled or enclosed; a space composed uniquely of openings, thresholds entrances and exists are confounded. The set comprised multiple overhead steel frames on which were suspended hundreds of plastic strips. These revolving, raising and lowering elements crated movement, confusion, blindness. Everything at the service of variation and interaction at slow or high speed movements, superimpositions, fragmentations, deceleration and micro-images. Wading through this misted world one encountered shadowy performers as much as other spectators. Each plastic element like the shattered arrangement of a kaleidoscopic world of action. Total spaces opened up to reveal the public, or performer bodies, huddled within, then descended again to conceal all. If Gravity Feed’s works were to be thought of politically, then it is a politics of pure means and potentiality. Where movement is thought of as becoming, and becoming defined by the shaking of the space-between, the body is a line that has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination……. Monstrous Body was presented at the Performance Space for the Headspace Season, and was a featured performance for the 9th General Meeting of Res Artis Knowledge+Dialogue+Exchange.