Splayed Mind Out

"In general my work revolves around ideas or images of distortion, privateness, memories, exposure. Distortion as a way of looking at beauty. Privateness as a way of looking at performance. Dance as a way to expose what is difficult to utter, out of embarassment, discomfort, unease; the failure of language."
Meg Stuart

The work of the American choreographer Meg Stuart always had a lot of affinities with the fine arts. Not only were a lot of her pieces inspired by it, she also collaborated intensively with a number of visual artists (such as Via Lewandowsky, Lawrence Malstaf, Bruce Mau, Lawrence Carroll).
With her company Damaged Goods, she initiated in 1996 the project Insert Skin. She proposed some visual artists to create a costume (an image, a prop) for a body to be choreographed. This costume can be seen as an "installation for a physical body". The body as a bridge between visual arts and contemporary dance.
But Insert Skin is much more than a formal discourse about different media. The resulting performance-moments are not only speaking about the body in itself, but reveal the fragmented worlds (its thoughts, desires, frustrations, fantasies, fears, pleasures,...) it contains.
For the third part of this long-running research project Stuart invited the American multimedia-artist Gary Hill. Since 1974 Hill produced built up an impressive opus of installations and videos, in which the main focus is on elements such as language, time and corporeality. One of the master-pieces of the previous documenta in Kassel was unquestionably his interactive installation Tall Ships.
Splayed Mind Out premiered on September 5th, 1997 at the documenta X in Kassel. "Deutlicher, konziser, konzentrierter als Meg Stuart hat bisher noch kein Choreograph das denkbare Verschwinden des Menschen hinter den elektronischen Medien und ihren Bildern thematisiert und analysiert. Sie tut es wertfrei. Sie tut es unaggressiv. Sie tut es mitfuehlend, aber nie sentimental." (Suddeutsche Zeitung)

Organised by: Cankarjev dom
In coproduction with: City of Women
Sponsor: Adria Airways - predstavništvo Pariz