2019/2 — #Gesture

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Drawing light: Gesture and suspense in the weave
De Brabandere, Nicole; Thain, Alanna (2019) , S. 189-211
In this essay, we remix the participatory gestures that emerged in and around Drawing Light, an experimental workshop that we developed in 2018 to explore what happens when illumination moves from a functionalist binary between the invisible and the visible, to become part of an affective charge that reorganises the relation between light and bodily presence, capture and dispersal, clarity and opacity. In other words, we explore the workshop’s propositional conditions that allowed participants to access the material supports of a cinematic experience – light and screens – in order to play with a gesturality in excess of the human, in order to develop a working concept of the ‘light gesture’. We begin by describing the workshop format. We then consider three selected movement ecologies of cinematic light and critical concepts from Suzanne Langer and Edouard Glissant that influenced the workshop design, to refine our sense of how light gestures are compositions with time, and to outline their ‘logic of feeling’. Finally, we revisit the workshop itself through a gestural catalogue, to consider how we re-choreographed these light gestures in collaboration with participants, to reopen the encounters which follow and draw out transversal weavings between ecologies, readings, and practice.