YOU MADE ME LOVE YOU
2005  / 4 minutes / colour

Twenty-one dancers play a game of cat and mouse with an unpredictable camera. Disoriented, the viewer is fixed by the gaze of dancers who crowd the frame.

Camera John Smith

On screen Lisa Ellis, Meg Benfield, Philippa Columbell, Donatella Cabras, Naomi Cook, Laura Dannequin, Gareth Green, Marguarite Galizia, Joe Garcia, Bianca Hopkins, Judy Ilson, Abrafi Kusi, Kate Lyons, Aura Lopez, Sara Lindstrom, Nicole McSkimming, Rosalind Noctor, Andreas Pirdal, Joseph Raisi, Beata Stanikowska, Hanna Tatham.

Supported by ‘Choreodrome’ at The Place, London; Arts Council England

...On the one hand this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be.

Dr Stephen Riley, Artsway open 2006

(...) They are asked to form a queue facing the camera (a very English idea). As with a stationary queue in which people start getting restless, those at the back try to gain a view of the counter, i.e. camera. But the picture is mostly filled by the four or five faces that are nearest to the camera, which block the view of the others. However, the camera does not allow the situation to settle; mounted on rails, it moves, sometimes slowly, then very rapidly, and always surprisingly, to the left or the right. The queue has to follow, which means that the faces that have just filled the picture suddenly disappear, allowing the deeper levels of staging, the dancers who are further away, to be seen. This video is thus shaped by a “constant line”, a rigid concept which, through its realisation, creates a lot of movement, overlapping, and surprising revelations. Meanwhile within the sound track moments of tense calm alternate with the patter of many bare feet, a noise that is all the more confusing because we never see the feet in the picture. What these three-and-a-half minutes allow us to see instead is a wealth of strangely touching portraits: twenty-one people “making love to the camera.

Dirk Schaefer 'Choreographies for the Camera' (see WORDS section for full text)