Tracing Shadows

Looking forward to coming to Cardiff and taking part in Experimentica 07!
Below is a some information about Tracing Shadows which is on Sunday 21st October @ 9pm

About Tracing Shadows

Tracing Shadows is based on The Girl and the Blue Dress a ‘coming of age’ fairytale that explores the idea of femininity as a construct, as something that is made and fabricated, then imposed on the body. In the story a young girl struggles with an enchanted blue dress that steals her voice, sews itself to her skin, and takes over her body and movement. Tracing Shadows contains all the characteristics of fairytale, with its dark undercurrents and psychoanalytical themes, its allusions to magic, the supernatural and uncanny, however, the performance avoids linear narrative and instead presents a series of physical and visual scenes that explore the process of female initiation addressed in the tale.

Helena presents the body at different stages of transformation and collapse. The human figure half emerges from the darkness, alone and trapped, struggling to stand, sliding into formlessness. Helena sculpts movement out of the darkness, using subtle traces of light, fragmenting the body and creating an eerie sense of displacement. Often movements are half- seen, the body is half-glimpsed, and light plays tricks with the eyes and imagination distorting perspective, space, size and shape. Sound mirrors and magnifies the action, adding weight, texture and solidity to the movement, emphasising the physical struggle that ensues. The imagery is surreal and striking, as light, sound, movement and shadow fuse together creating a hypnotic and disturbing experience that activates and engages the imagination.

‘In Tracing Shadows Helena Hunter sculpts with her body the dark conflict between inner and outer selves; this is a hallucinatory and uncompromising act of self-portraiture with powerful contemporary resonance’
Marina Warner