Photo : Anika Ste Marie
Processes of preservation
Florence Winter Bowdige
Biography
Flo is a Contemporary Dancer from London. Graduating from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance with a First Class Honours degree, their work aims to combine their dancing with their interest in other fine art forms and methods. To Flo, movement is a language form, a language that seems to define the inconceivable, express the ambiguous and ultimately communicate what we cannot with words.
An interest in personal essence and the codified language of movement are concepts Flo began developing in her final year of study at Trinity Laban. To be recognised in your own Art, to be known by something you make, is very important to them. Writing, sketchbooking, pencil drawings, acrylic paintings are fundamental methods Flo uses to produce her final outcomes. This interest in language has been developed as a consequence of her exposure to Laban’s notation, the carving spatial designs of Cunningham technique and working with artists such as Heidi Rustgaard, Company Candoco and Jean Abreu Dance Company.
In addition to Language, Flo is interested in documentation, often carrying a notepad or sketchbook to help her navigate, understand and remember experiences. She aims to find a way to remember the feeling and movement of dance without a camera. This aim will not only document the dance, but can also be used as a choreographic tool for the creation of movement. She has a love for preservation and collecting things. It has been essential to Flo’s system as a person since she was a child.
In the future, Flo would like to keep adding to her collections, keep re-thinking and researching to create work with different perspectives. This time in Canada has been quite life altering and she will definitely be back. It’s strange when a new place becomes home.
Thanks to Stephanie and Stephane for facilitating Big Bang and being so generous.
Besides the training, facts and figures, Flo describes her person like this:
Flowery writing, deep thinking and detail, saved change, paper cuttings and lost pencils. After- school clubs and ready meals. Dinner on laps and magnums for pud. Dancing in front of the kitchen mirror, drawings on the floor. Clammy hands, finger-nail biting and major side eye. Thinking, walking, talking, everywhere.
Whilst I am an adult now and have experiences new things, Dance began intertwined with my personal life. Even when things were tough, my love for dance was unwavering, much to the belief of my younger self but also the unwavering support of my Dad.
Artistic Intention
Flo’s piece intends to find a new way to document dance and people, which has formed a new ideographic language which can be translated into movement as well as notated through paint and paper.
My piece explores processes of preservation: A documentation of a group, translated into a painting, mirrored in movement and the experience frozen in time by meditation.
Starting with 17 mark-making drawings from the dancers on my Dance programme and through hours of re-drawing and distillation, I have created a composition of our collective. This map is how I will remember my time on Big Bang, as well as becoming the language for my movement score. Through this distillation, my language score and painting is centred around seven remaining symbols.
The painted composition acts as a permanent documentation of the transient dance unfolding below. When the mirrored Dance below is finished, my solo and Big Bang experience can be remembered in its painted form and continue to be developed in its ideographic form. I like to think that this codified language was created from Big Bang and in the future can become my own choreographic language to be used on other dancers. To preserve the piece further it is performed as a cyclical mediation. This idea came to me after a study by the artist Hilma Af Klint, who believed to be connected spiritually to the gods, transcribing their language through her Art. I believe there to be aesthetic links between my composition and those of Klint’s. The meditation allows me to mindfully document my experience by pausing time, connecting to this moment and its movement.
