Bruise blood.

Bruise Blood is a dance work by Shobana Jeyasingh. This was the world premiere of the 30 minute multimedia work for 7 dancers and a beat boxer incorporating dance, design and newly commissioned music. It used an existing work by composer Steve Reich to be re mixed live by a beat boxer

Faultline.

This work was inspired by Gautam Malkani's 2006 novel Londonistan and by my own critical reflections on the tensions and contradictions of Asian youth in the UK. The use of a literary source as a stimulus drew me into a consideration of narrative and the ways in which strands of narrative can merge or collide into a resonant field or matrix. The work is constructed so that the choreography can represent the ceaseless restlessness of migration and displaced identity and the movement vocabulary references martial arts, ballet, contemporary dance and Bharatha Natyam. The assembling of this production involved commissioning music from Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) and fellow ResCen artist Errollyn Wallen who composed a score for the classical Indian soprano Patricia Rozario, together with film by Pete Gomes. This work was designed to extend the dance language developed to date and the creative process required the dancers to respond athletically as well as deploying more codified dance languages and drawing on representational gesture. Passages of almost unformed energy were interspersed with rhythmic precision in order to develop a fractured and dislocated sense of place. The relationships between the music/sound/film/ design were also intended to be shifting and negotiated, so that the work could achieve congruence without an artificial coherence. Isabel Hilton for Radio 3 (Arts and Ideas) covered Faultline on 5 February 2007,21:30-22:15 On Monday 5 March 2007 17:00-19:00 (Radio 3)I was interviewed by Petroc Trelawny, with soprano Patricia Rozario and sonic artist Scanner, in the lead-up to the premiere of the piece

Exit no exit.

The research concerns of this work centre around the disruption of perspective and the tension between the organic and the constructed, fractional, angular and many-sided. Correspondingly, the movement, design and sound form different dimensions that variously overlap, outflank or upstage each other, producing a kind of composite view of the stage. In opposition to this, the piece also explores more organic, natural forms and at times the stage is presented as an inhabited place with a table, a chair and imaginary doors. It moves between sounds and sights that are angular, divided and synthetic, and those that are more curved, integrated and organic. The movement vocabulary also presents these oppositions with the contemporary and idiosyncratic in dynamic exchange with more formal, classical features, and the interplay of curved versus angular forms.The disruption to perspective also occurs through time and the work explores a notion of restlessness as a core feature – this is designed to destabilise any single, fixed view held by the spectator addressing the reality of mobility and fluidity that features in contemporary lives. Collaborators: Music - Michael Nyman; Stage lighting - Lucy Carter; Film - Nichola Bruce

[h]interland GDA, and touring as [h]interland 2.

Site-specific, multi-media piece, commissioned by and for Greenwich Dance Agency. My research enquiry was complex: how to push forward, creatively, the already-established interest in telematics/live performance and cultural difference? I wanted the piece itself, and its spectators, to 'travel between different lands', while simultaneously occupying a given multi-cultural space. I combined, in the event, a real-time webcast of performance from Bangalore, digitally manipulated film of the same dancer in urban settings, plus the presence onsite of live dancers, singers and spectators. In site-exploratory terms,live dancers used balconies, lifts and the stalls as performing areas in the dance agency building, with a series of variously-positioned large-scale film projections, matching or dominating the proportions of materially present performers. The incidentals of the site, together with live, real-time and mediated image-material from India, co-operated to conjure up mainlands/hinterlands of different kinds. The dispersed/juxtaposed contributions of performance elements equally enacted a timely signature-specific ‘dance-performance' hinterland. The relationships (real/virtual) allowed within a highly particular, internally differentiated space, allowed me to thematise the challenging intermix of social and aesthetic contexts. In compositional terms, I focused on expert cross-media artistic collaborations within 'dance': I brought together the (materially present)professional dancers, Sowmya Gopalan and Mavin Khoo, with live transmission of performance by Chitra Srishailan in Bangalore; input from live vocalists, Buttrich and Fuchs; the live webcast work of artistic & technical director, Braun and lighting design by Carter. Other collaborators included Donnacha Dennehy; Bangalore film director, Pete Gomes; visual design, J.Parker. Funded by the Arts Council, Dance Umbrella and the Greenwich Dance Agency. The making processes specific to (h)interland were the subject of a webposting on the ResCen website which explored some of the research concerns and the issues that arose in the making of the work. The DVD records [h]interlands 2 at Robin Howard Theatre

Counterpoint

The courtyard of Somerset House, in common with all grand historical buildings, has many stories to tell. Its symmetry and formal lines that have stood unchanged for centuries, the patterns of its fountains, and the vast and intense whiteness of the space that hits you as you walk in on a hot summer day - these are some of its stories. The dance in Counterpoint plays with these elements and is shaped by them. It also offers contrasting moments of intimacy and rapidly changing speeds, textures and dynamics