Two staff members from Solihull College & University Centre have collaborated on an exciting new art initiative. Lisa Cleaver, Head of School for Visual, Performing Arts and Media and Kirsten Adkins who is a lecturer on a top up course in the art department have created the Force art project. Force is a film installation and dance, devised in collaboration with physical theatre. It focuses on force and impact and safe delivery of harm and forms part of Kirsten’s PHD.
The duo created two pieces within the project, ‘Grab First, Grip Firmly’ a 25 minute video of two people struggling with one another and a 2nd piece, ‘Chancery Against Low Frontal Attack’ which is a series of movements exploring physical and spatial relationships in conflict. The work focuses on themes of gesture, body and cycles of aggression. Aggressive and defensive actions are continually repeated to the point where it becomes unclear whether the viewer is witnessing acts of play, violence, harm or care. Both bodies are seized and transformed by this forceful, cyclical exchange.
Filmed by Cameraman Geoff Ward and featuring two physical theatre performers, Joanne Tremarco and Chris Murray, Kirsten and Lisa take viewers on a journey of how bodies are transformed through acts of violence.
The Force project has generated buzz and was recently featured at ‘International Conference on The Image’ in Hong Kong and was shown at artist space Minerva Works in Birmingham. Kirsten, who was a journalist, producer and director at the BBC for ten years and Lisa who was a physical theatre director, collaborated, merging two different skill sets and are exhibiting the project as a duo. Lisa stated ‘We hope to show Force to our HE students for inspiration and motivation’.
