Bubble up in Blue, a live performance
Amanda is performing live at
Queens University, Belfast
5 May 2012 5pm - 8pm
as part of Bbeyond's
The Art of Encounter
with
Black Market Internationalhttp://theartofencounter.tumblr.com/
The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic
Directed by Robert Wilson
Teatro Real, Madrid
11 -22 April 2012
quoting Amanda Coogan's Live Performance, Yellow and Medea.
Photo: Omid Hashemi, Coogan's Medea.
Yellow, An ArtFilm.
Limerick City Gallery of Art,
TENSE
March-April 2012
http://yellowthefilm.wordpress.com/
Buried deep in the market area off Dublin's Capel Street, almost underground, is the historic Irish abbey, St. Mary’s. Here, in this hallowed space, six women dressed in yellow come, one by one and night after night, to wash and re-wash the long garment they are wearing. With effusive liquid emerging between their legs the action sits on a vertiginous axis between orgasmic and shameful. The ritual of repeatedly submerging and scrubbing the fabric they wear becomes an act of cleansing and rebirth, their raw knuckles scraping, increasingly violently, against the fabric. The grunts and groans of their efforts become haunting sounds echoing throughout the chamber. Their bodies twist and contort, becoming harbingers of an almost talismanic energy; an energy that can be felt like breath on your face, an energy that collectively becomes a triumph of the spirit. This film of that event has as its premise that to endure is to live and finally to triumph. It engages with the shamanist ritual of healing. These six extraordinary performances filmed in a series of epic single takes is an Irish film unlike any other you'll see this year. Amanda Coogan and Paddy Cahill's film presents concurrently on a single canvas the six performances, unfolding over four hours, following the durational nature of the original performances.
Yellow is a collision between Live Performance Art and Film. How do you explore Live Performance Art with Film? Cahill and Coogan have, for the past number of years, worked together recording Live Performances from the Visual Arts. (Seven Steps for the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Accumulator for VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art). It is out of these experiences they began to explore methods of doing justice to what they see as fundemental elements of Live Performance; duration, and the evolution of the physical experience of the performer. To this end Cahill constructed a rig for his camera that allowed freedom of movement with the camera and to record each four hour live performance in one take. Cahill became the seventh performer in the project, reacting to the live performance in an, immediate, embodied way.
