成人快手

Simon Armitage CBE - poet and author of Still

Still was originally commissioned to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the battle of the Somme and to commemorate the centenary of WW1. The poems are versions of Virgil's Georgics, a long sequence of poems written about agriculture; in the exhibition and the accompanying book the pieces were set against battlefield photographs, many of them "obliques" taken from aircraft or balloons for reconnaissance purposes.

War, in the final reckoning, is about land gained and land lost.

Simon Armitage

Virgil's poems focus on vine cultivation, animal-husbandry, bee-keeping and other farming techniques, but have a subtext of nation-building and territoriality. The Roman road that arrows through the Somme region, between the towns of Albert and the Bapaume, roughly describes the distance and direction of the Somme offensive - twelve miles in five or so months, a conflict that cost over a million lives.

The road (now National Route D929!) was probably built around the same time as Virgil was composing his work, and the war photographs of the fields, meadows and forests of Picardy have a curious and ironic parallel with his writings. War, in the final reckoning, is about land gained and land lost.

I'm delighted the poems and photographs have contributed to this new work of art within the centenary period, particularly in the sense that they have become activated and animated through film, music and dance, lifting them out of the frames and pages of their original two dimensional existence into something with a vitality and dynamism I couldn't have previously envisaged.

Jackie Goodman – Director, JoinedUp Dance Company

Although the performance piece takes on a life of its own, each element is firmly rooted in the source material provided by Simon Armitage’s poems and the images from the Imperial War Museum collection. The oblique perspective presented by the aerial photos and its influence on the subject matter of the poems is the key element of the performance.

Movement slips out of sync and becomes explosive as natural patterns are destroyed.

Jackie Goodman

The structure of the performance piece maps landscape, its disruptions and modifications by patterns of use and by the intervention of major events. Land is traced physically by the dancers and visually by the projection, initially using low tech techniques to reflect the basic equipment used so inventively to produce the aerial “obliques”.

Lines of poetry provide rhythms that create choreographic phrases, countering insistent rhythms of the music and emphasising the force of change. Movement slips out of sync and becomes explosive as natural patterns are destroyed.

The music composition is built on small loops that are being constantly manipulated. On top of the textural base sounds, melodic fragments are mirrored by traditional instruments. Projections layer the stage and the dancers with increasingly abstract and textural images. A circularity of renewal overlays disruption, gradually reforming and reclaiming a tentative and temporary stasis.

Dancers: Chloe Sweeting, Mark Pearce
Music: Joe Roper
Video: Kirstie Henderson
Costumes: Lynn Benson