Harness 2007
To view Harness
edited video footage go to:
www.youtube.com/ainephillips
Performing Rights Vienna
Tanzquartier Performance Space,
Vienna, 10th of March 2007
Hotel Ballymun, Dublin, 6th of April 2007
Description
A conventionally staged performance with video projections, recorded sound, actions and spoken script, this work explores my relationship with my profoundly brain damaged brother and a daughter born with a temporary disability. I wear a harness costume based on a correctional medical traction-harness used on my infant and address the audience with a poetic script elaborating emotional experiences associated with these relationships. In this script I link the personal content with political realities and transcendent states of being, such as desire and love.
Publicity information for the work
Harness re-enacts experiences growing up with a profoundly brain damaged brother. This boy is violent and beautiful, harnessed to a wheelchair, helmeted to protect his face from falling in seizures.
Twenty years later she gives birth to a daughter with dislocated hips who is strapped into traction for half a year.
The artist speaks their embodiments and performs their modes of harness, translating constraint into tenderness, torture into rapture, helplessness into power.
She shows the vulnerability of wholeness, the purpose of union in extreme human experience and how the personal becomes political…
I am my brother
I exist in an enigmatic deviance
I am a variation on anomaly, my body is wild and unable… but able is a judgement between boundaries and I am unbounded
I am my own child
I am tiny, bare and unmended in exceptional restraint, for the sake of completion,
Helpless in my centre of power
We are all two people…we are both the injured and the whole
Duration of piece
30 minutes
edited video footage go to:
www.youtube.com/ainephillips
Performing Rights Vienna
Tanzquartier Performance Space,
Vienna, 10th of March 2007
Hotel Ballymun, Dublin, 6th of April 2007
Description
A conventionally staged performance with video projections, recorded sound, actions and spoken script, this work explores my relationship with my profoundly brain damaged brother and a daughter born with a temporary disability. I wear a harness costume based on a correctional medical traction-harness used on my infant and address the audience with a poetic script elaborating emotional experiences associated with these relationships. In this script I link the personal content with political realities and transcendent states of being, such as desire and love.
Publicity information for the work
Harness re-enacts experiences growing up with a profoundly brain damaged brother. This boy is violent and beautiful, harnessed to a wheelchair, helmeted to protect his face from falling in seizures.
Twenty years later she gives birth to a daughter with dislocated hips who is strapped into traction for half a year.
The artist speaks their embodiments and performs their modes of harness, translating constraint into tenderness, torture into rapture, helplessness into power.
She shows the vulnerability of wholeness, the purpose of union in extreme human experience and how the personal becomes political…
I am my brother
I exist in an enigmatic deviance
I am a variation on anomaly, my body is wild and unable… but able is a judgement between boundaries and I am unbounded
I am my own child
I am tiny, bare and unmended in exceptional restraint, for the sake of completion,
Helpless in my centre of power
We are all two people…we are both the injured and the whole
Duration of piece
30 minutes
