Stillness and Antony Gormley

Sad to see the other day that the Antony Gormley man had disappeared from Waterloo bridge. The bronze casts of Gormley that stood and silently stared out from their perches all around the South Bank had been with us all summer. I'd heard about them before I encountered the one on Waterloo bridge, but it was something different to see it in the flesh, as it were.

I felt a kind of pulling. I felt as though if I stood as still as that 'man' was, I would feel stuck, and pulled. There's such an onwards rush in London. We people, like molecules, flow along as rivers, as streams (watch the suits emerge from London Bridge station in the morning - they pour over the bridge into the City - it's quite a sight). And to stand still amongst all that is just not done.

Yes, tourists dither, consult maps, take snapshots. And there are homeless people who are separate from the fray - hunched at the side of the streets. But who stands, just stands and is?

Just the little bronze men, so far as I know.

That was really powerful to me. It made me want to stop and stand and see everything rushing around me. And it served as a contrast, a quiet comment on our franticness.

Others have made much of the way the statues seemed to look after or over the people below then. How it wasn't clear whether they were surveying the landscape or contemplating a jump.

I just loved the stillness. The reminder to be still.

Pictures of the sculptures http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/may/03/art?picture=329805762
Interview with Lalitaraja about stillness and meditation in dance http://www.dharmalife.com/issue26/stillness.html
Article about recent collaborative work between Antony Gormley, Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Nitin Sawnhey http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1526373,00.html

The Wellcome Collection

...is really rather good. Its very slick and stylish and modern. It's a real exemplar of novel ways to present information, and also of how to play with that information in the first place. The modern medicine room is cross-disciplinary in a really exciting way; science and art meshing together completely comfortably.

Short recorded lectures about malaria speak just to you as you sit in a chair. A gigantic plaster model of a distorted body, representing 'I can't help what I think' stands next to a graphical representation of heartbeats, a beautiful glass scuplture of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, a piece made of mosquito nets and little photos about AIDS in Africa. Glass cases hold exercise videos, diet books and other familiar artefacts of our modern obsession with size and health - emphasising the point that our own present culture can be put in a case and labelled and studied just the same as that foreignness of the past.

And the events... really innovative and interesting. See links below.

The staff are helpful, the cakes in the cafe look good, and the building - where I used to go and read and fall asleep back in my degree days - is lovely as ever. Can't wait to see the new sleep and dreaming exhibition coming soon.

The Wellcome Collection http://www.wellcomecollection.org/
Witness live heart surgery http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/events/WTX041264.htm
Books to make you better http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/events/WTX039485.htm
An experimental and experiential insight into the materiality of flesh http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/events/WTX041288.htm

The way we walk

This is what I was wondering the other day as my mind gave up determinedly focusing and drifted away from the business finance it was supposed to be taking in: I was wondering about the ways people walk and why I like some gaits, find some gestures annoying, am irritated by some gesticulation or posture. Why I even notice it consciously at all.

I often find myself watching people and analysing their walks, the way they exit a room, drink a cup of tea, sit down, stand up. If I know them, I might match it to what I know of them; if I don't I might make spurious conjecture about them based on it. Or I might just follow the patterns, studying the peculiar way they curl their figures as they speak or the angle of their feet as they stand.

It made me think about the idea of dance as a language. You are building up your vocabulary, your dictionary, our choreography teacher used to tell us at Birkbeck, so that when you know enough of the technicalities of the language, you can say what you want to say in it.

I wondered whether my habit is in part because I am traditionally not a person particularly adept with spoken language. Articulacy is much easier for me on paper than straight from the brain into the air.

Maybe being quiet, being careful with words, means I am more likely to try and take more from the unvocalised language of movement?

Who knows. But what of the movement itself? The movement we all unthinkingly act out every day. The walk with which your close acquaintances can recognise you way before your face comes into focus, the way you sit in a chair, the little tics - pulling hems of shirts, playing with hair, nodding, gesturing, the rhythms to your being in space. How are they learned? How do we manipulate them? How much is physically limited, how much is driven by other factors and what are they? How aware are we of the style we move? What can we read into them? Do I see someone and match their swagger to the arrogance or defensively shielded vulnerability I have already detected in them, or do I imagine that characteristic subconsciously because of the swagger?....

I was in a training session the other week with a trainer whose hand movements were jerky and repetitive; whose spine curled over when he sat, whose head twitched from side to side as he listened to our comments. I wanted to attach some kind of movement sensors to his ears, his nose, his elbows and his fingertips. And then to film so that we could watch those movements without their body, to see people mapped out by their habitual positions and postures and unthought out shapes and motions and drawings in the air.