Urban re:passages

The Lost Narrative

A lost narrative

A site specific performance installation by Beatrice Jarvis

Winter Dance Gathering

December 4^th 2009

Dartington College of Arts

A space of peace. The city for lost dreams desires and fears. A movement of solace and empathy for the lost ideals. Whispers, echoes, the imprinted memory in my camera of a thousand forgotten footsteps, a candle burns bright in homage to a fallen utopia, a wasteland as playground for the disaffected.

This piece will explore the emotional and architectural aspects of performance space in a practical and ideological form, seeking to reflect the death of a part of the human soul in a era of hyper modernity.

The total narrative of urban structure a seeking to form an understanding through constructions of multiple narratives of the interpretation of complex infrastructures. This is an exercise of documentation of human experience of urban form to generate a softness through choreographic semiotic that strives to overcome the complexities of the comprehension of daily life. An investigation of the affects of architecture of on the individual. Cities which are constructed and deconstructed through myth and reality that defies cartographic navigation and seeks instead a creative expression of sympathy to overcome such monumental questioning of the nature of being.

The Winter Dance Gathering was a unique opportunity to reflect upon my work in the very situation in which my practice emerged.

A memory that lingers of a place where utopic vision became standard and expectation knew no limitation.

My artistic practice is a searching and a questioning using the city street as a myriad of inspiration; how do artists function, flourish and create in the city? How does the city inspire a creative response? How does the everyday life in the city become an inspiration? Does the nature of this inspiration change as cities expand, develop and transform?

I started at Dartington in 2005. An eighteen year old with little knowledge as to really what I wanted to develop from my time at Dartington. I started of on a straight choreography degree. I wanted to dance I thought. I practiced piles, did lots of sit ups and felt generally unsatisfied. Over the process of three years of sitting in empty buildings; rolling down hills; sleeping in studios; running to find exhaustion; collecting images until my room became so full I had to rent next door; I began to emerge. An artist? A thinker? A choreographer? An eccentric? There need be no categorisation; this was tree years of unique experimentation which I firmly believe should lay at the heart of all creative education; time to explore experiment and expand all notions of practice; a luxury that extends beyond words which allowed me to begin to develop a research approach which now sees me where I am today.

My experience at Dartington provided me with a wide and diverse artistic and academic skills base. I focused my degree on what can be loosely termed as Urban Studies, with enquiry into anthropological practices, flaneurie, derive and observational practice with relation to explorations of choreography. Using street and city as my studio, I conducted studies of the use of urban wasteland in the UK and Europe. I express my explorations in a diverse range of media, chiefly photography, performance, film and writing. As a student I exhibited in a range of locations and countries building my practice as an artist. Currently I am at the start now of my postgraduate studies in Sociology; which seems to span visual performance; anthropology; research architecture and curation.

What does it mean to be an interdisciplinary practioner?

The creative arts can define a personal notion of reality in relation to a wider scope than the potentials of individual perception modal schema; art can function further as sociological and ethnographic archive; even as quasi archaeological objects; within the notion of encapsulated theory. My work now strives to form a practical vision for change and a potential schema to initiate social dialogue; I stray from the term artist; photographer and choreographer as I find these terms to be alienation and hierarchy; essentially I am researcher formulating multifaceted visions as the potentials that exist between spaces, spaces and people; in time and space.

To wonder then what may be left in this place?

A performance to mark a silence

My fondest memories of any kind of collaboration of this sort perhaps take shapes which cannot be constructed in memory; they are faded like the autumn leaves we tumbled in; an era perhaps; a hope which sat with us in the deserted swimming pools in the middle night; My first collaborations at Dartington were with Fine Art, Theatre and Music, making multi-disciplinary experiments and testing our boundaries and pushing our limits; This meant working at all hours, in the gardens, in the grounds, in our flats, on trains, at the bus stop, on day trips to Newton Abbot, it was essentially the start of a truly live-work approach, where we all allowed out practices to start to infiltrate all aspects of daily lives. now I search to create with the same idealism and essence we sought then l I find at times an innate disappointment and frustration with the notion of collaboration in London and gently remind myself; a city is a fluid entity constructed by the personal narratives which form it