Katrina Brown has been a resident in Šilainiai 3-10 November 2017.

Meeting with the artist at Šilainiai library (Baltų pr. 81, Kaunas) – 9 November 2017.

Residency outcome –   artist  book  STILLED: tilt/linger/concrete/ –  Katrina_Brown_2017 (A3 PDF)

S T I  L L E D : t i l t / l i n g e r  / c o n c r e t e /

STILLED is a book-document extending out of the artist-in residence programme 2018 of the socially-engaged Šilainiai-Project in Kaunas, Lithuania. The residency was an invite to work in and respond to the 1980s Soviet-built Šilainiai neighbourhood and Katrina proposed to explore the area as a choreographic work-site and to continue exploring body and place in relation to themes of (dis) orientation and presence.

STILLED follows on from the book-document, ASSEMBLED and also consists of three large folded pages containing photographic images, scores, drawings and texts. The reader is invited to navigate and turn, the pages themselves having no fixed up-down orientation. Please contact Katrina at http://katrinabrown.net/ if you would like a copy.

swimming pool = plaukimo baseinas

Staying in Šilainiai – I am struck by the stark contrast between outside and inside sensations. Gazing out over the beautiful stark crown-scape and below to the basketball pitch, playground, people, cars, children, dogs it is warm and quiet in the flat. It seems that everyone is quietly isolated and insulated in their flats. Outside there is a November emptiness – one day bright light and blue sky and another day grey and heavy. People work in the city centre of Kaunas on the other side of the river to Šilainiai neighbourhood. Here, there are primary and secondary schools, a market, supermarkets, a bakery, a pizzeria.

And I find a swimming pool. Like the kitchen table, the swimming pool is a familiar place. In this pool I swim lanes, note the bare slightly damaged concrete interior walls. School children line up on the edge, sitting and kicking legs rigorously on the whistle signal of a young instructor whilst the few of us, adults with no work to go to that day, calmly swim our lanes – our different rhythmic strokes punctuated with the whistle and children kicking and splashing.

I absorb the architectural lines, acoustics and communal atmosphere of the pool and then of the women’s changing room with girls’ chatter, lockers, showers, benches – a humid echo-ing room of women old and young. Places work into and are absorbed by skin of ears, eyes, body.

 

Artist info before the residency

tilt/dust/fleeting

 

Katrina Brown is a UK/NL based interdisciplinary choreographer working across performance, drawing and installation. In this residency she will be exploring a series of sites in Šilainiai through rhythmic movement structures and quiet positionings of her body – as two strategies that can tilt and shift the material details and architectural form of each time-place.

 

Repetitive movement works as a persistent presence that increasingly resonates with a building’s structure whereas stillness settles a body like the dust.

 

Alongside she will make a series of drawings; direct, fast, pen-ink drawings that respond to the spatial slants, orientations of her body to surface and to the repetitive scoring of movement. She is interested in how both ground and page operate as a site  – with the horizontal plane of the dusty hard ground activated by her physical presence and the clean smooth page by her drawing actions.

I implement drawing as a way of revealing political, material, graphic and sensual entanglements of working and moving on the floor. Drawing operates as score, live event, material process and residual evidence – allowed to unfold as choreographic activity rather than gestural expressive act – an activity that facilitates and brings to attention the gravitational forces and surface dimension of movement – drawing as a means to explore surfaces of paper, floor, skin and screen in their capacity to touch, support, make visible and distribute evidence.

Her practice-based PhD thesis intersect/surface/body: A Choreographic View of Drawing was submitted in April 2017 (Falmouth University/UAL) – a practical investigation of drawing in relation to material process, scoring action and surface touch.
The series of live durational drawing scores, She’s only doing this: scoresand the installation Translucent Surface/Quiet body, have evolved from the research. kbdraw

Katrina was freelance choreographer/teacher in the Netherlands for 23 years, producing work through DansWerkplaats and [Nes]theaters and completing her MA at Dance Unlimited, Theatre School Amsterdam in Choreography and New Media in 2006. The performance event Etsbeest is a collaboration with songwriter and artist Han Buhrs, for and with a pre-school audience has travelled throughout Europe to festivals and urban projects since 2008. She relocated to the UK in 2009 and is currently part-time Senior Lecturer Choreography at Falmouth University (previously Dartington College of Arts). She has collaborated since 2011 with choreographer Rosanna Irvine with work including the performance-installation  what remains and is to come (ongoing),the artist book what remains and is to come: A Document (2014) and video installation surface/sphere commissioned by Independent Dance/Siobhan Davies Dance for the What Festival 2016.

http://www.katrinabrown.net/

 

Šilainiai Project 2017 Artist residencies are partly financed by Lithuanian Culture Council.

Images and artwork ©Katrina Brown / Portrait image ©Evelina Šimkutė