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Bodies in Flight (Simon Jones and Sara Giddens) present their 17th performance project to close Friday’s 4 Days activities. Featuring the 15-person Night Bus Choir, live gymnasts and original music composed by local musician Jen Bell.


With: Bodies In Flight

Gymnast – a response to the 2012 Olympic Games – explores the athlete’s determination to acquire the skills necessary to achieve physical excellence. Committed to innovative work in which flesh utters and words move, Bodies in Flight explore the athlete’s dedication from the insider’s point of view – the trainee gymnast – and from the spectator’s point of view, the admiration we often feel observing the achievement of physical mastery. As with previous works from Bodies in Flight there is an acknowledgement of ‘the audience’ resulting in something both avant-garde and accessible for a wide cross-section of spectators.

Bodies in Flight uncover the hidden, unspoken feelings and passions in everyday events, making these experiences visible as choreography and poetry/spoken word. Using the gymnast’s training session as both source and structure, moving from basic warm-up routines to the display of exercises, Gymnast presents a micro-choreography revealing the supreme attention to bodily task and the resulting beauty of movement. The hand as it twists on the rings, the suspended high point on the parallel bars, the thousands of minute adjustments needed just to hold that ‘still’.

The choreography is placed alongside new writing from Simon Jones, set to music, composed by Jen Bell and sung by The Night Bus Choir. In parallel, video-maker Tony Judge (also of Creative Forum) presents filmworks consisting of interviews and sequences captured from training regimes.

Please note Gymnast will remain as a video installation on Sat 19 & Sun 20 Jan during 4 Days.

About the artists

Bodies in Flight formed in 1990 to make performance that explores the encounter between flesh and text, and challenges and reinvigorates the conventional relationship between audiences and performers. The company (led by Sara Giddens and Simon Jones) are renowned for their innovative collaborations with sonic, visual and performance artists and have toured extensively nationally and internationally. Gymnast was first presented as part of Ferment (Jan 2012), and then developed to include multi-screen video and additional gymnasts at The Surface Gallery, Nottingham (Oct 2012).

http://www.bodiesinflight.co.uk/
http://dance4.co.uk/artists/project/touring/about/touring/bodies-flight-gymnast
http://www.creativeforum.co.uk/
http://theatrebristol.net/jennifer-bell

Bodies in Flight’s installation Do The Wild Thing! (Redux) features in Arnolfini’s Light Studio until 30 Dec as part of the collaborative research project Performing Documents.