This is for you

This is for you is a site-specific public artwork designed to be seen through a window, by one person at a time. The viewer watches a dancer, who performs in the street opposite them amidst the unpredictable space of the everyday. It is about endings. The work has been devised in a variety of contexts but had its fullest realisation in the ‘A Million Minutes’ commission in Archway, London (see film extracts of this above). In this version, the dancer was joined in the street by a local member of the public who was asked to show the viewer something of themselves such as; an aspect of their work or an interest or a skill. The movement of the dancer was improvised responding to the viewer and the site but the order and quality of events was set in a detailed score which can be seen in the website link above.

In brief, the watcher would be shown to their seat by a host and then left to watch the street for some time. The dancer would then come into view and hold up a piece of paper with ‘This is for you’ written on it. They would then map the space of the street for the viewer by placing themselves in physical relationships with the objects and spaces of the street. They would then dance for them, as a gift. After this, the local person would share something with the viewer and then call them on the phone and ask them how they wanted the piece to end. Whatever was chosen the dancer would then dance slowly down the road until they disappeared from view. During this time the local person would slip out of view unnoticed.

The work researches the relationship between contingency and structure in urban site-specific practice. It focused on developing structures that worked to contain the uncertainties of the city environment. One of the most notable devices being the use of what Loy refers to as ‘event time’ actions where ‘the time of an activity is integral to the activity itself’ (Loy, 2001: 273). In Archway this included actions like; a key being hand cut by a local hardware shop owner or the dancer using stride lengths to measure out a designated space. Others containing structures researched included; telling the viewer what was going to happen before it did, using kinaesthetic differentiation (e.g. stillness amidst speed, verticals amongst horizontals) to generate a hierarchy of importance for the viewer, touch as a sense-making process of comparison, and holding the gaze between dancer and witness.

• https://sophiehope.org.uk/wp-content/upl...