sonia york-pryce

Exhibition essay - Sally Molloy PhD Candidate

I am trying to understand what I am looking at. More to the point I am trying to listen to what I am looking at. Sumptuous cello harmonies cradle and carry me. My gaze is drawn from digital projection to digital projection. I detect older bodies; women and men, fifty plus. They are moving improvisationally alone-together. My brows furrow. A flicker of disquiet pervades my sense of repose. These lithely time-worn figures are dancing. Yes dancing. And more besides.  

Western dance is boringly youth-oriented and so these older dancing bodies are surprising, even subversive. As Nanako Nakajima states in ‘De-aging Dancerism? The Aging Body In Contemporary And Community Dance’(2011), the context of negative prejudice against the aging body in Western dance prompts the question: “if dancers are aging but still dancing, is the art of dance degenerating?”1  Artist Sonia York-Pryce insists that the opposite is true. “The older dancing body doesn’t get much of a peep”, she states “but at retirement age [approx. 35 years old] you’re only just becoming a fascinating artist”.2 In response to this conviction (and the upshot of a lengthy research project) York-Pryce’s exhibition Corporeal Architecture investigates sincerely and candidly what it means to dance in maturity.   

An artist residency at Hospitalfield (Scotland) early in the project resulted in the making of utterly (in)appropriate, a black and white film depicting York-Pryce improvising in hundred-year-old printmaking studios. The weathered timber flooring like a worn-out longtime friend, the inky fingerprint-smudged doorway suggestive of many bodies passing through, of time passing. Close-ups of York-Price’s skin, torso, and hands emphasise her specific corporealness. There are no tricks, but that’s a relief because in this instance – and for the purpose of the exercise – subtlety trumps spectacle.   

Following this initial autoethnographic study, York-Pryce invited eight trained older dancers (friends and peers aged between 57 and 67 years old) to each respond improvisationally to a series of choreographic steps or motifs. Their responses (filmed in studios in London and New York) were to become Interprète/Inappropriate Behaviour. It is important to note that these are not recordings of existing dance re-presented on screen for accessibility; these are examples of ‘dancefilm’, a discrete artform in which dancers “address themselves to the nature of the medium and create dance film video specifically to be screened”.3 But what of live-ness? In her text ‘Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image’ (2010) Erin Brannigan notes that the dancefilm model has the capacity to liberate the dancing body from theatrical concepts of liveness and audience participation.4 Instead, as Philipa Rothfield notes, the corporeal screen presence particular to dancefilm invites sustained and sensual observation of the dancing body.5   

Corporeal Architecture is an exploration of what it means to dance in maturity. It is an exploration of “bodily situatedness” as artist Isabel Lewis states,6 or of “corporeal difference” to use York-Pryce’s own words. But it is more than just an exploration, it is a statement. The dancers in these dancefilms are members of what could arguably be called a disenfranchised social group. They are older dancers, fascinating artists, but seemingly superfluous to the needs of the western dance context. Through dancefilm however – that is to say, a medium that invites sustained and sensual observation – these older dancers are demanding to be seen. They are demanding visibility, demanding to be heard, demanding to be valued.   

The body in dance remains a site for focus and meaning-production and the articulation of thought.7 The dancing body is a speaking body. It is a site for knowledge production; and dissemination. In Corporeal Architecture the speaking body is an aging body whose discourse relates not to scissor kicks, summersaults, or splits, but rather relates to the exploratory, elusive, inexplicable; and perhaps most importantly is reactive against and resistant to a mainstream creative culture of hyper-productivity and discrimination.   
 

1 Nanako Nakajima p.102

2 Sonia York-Pryce, conversations with the artist.                                    

3 Dave Allen cited in Erin Brannigan.

4 Erin Brannigan p. 9-11.

5 Philipa Rothfield cited in Brannigan p.12

6 The Artist As, p. 183

7 The Artist As, p. 196