Susanne Clausen

Ballet, 2009 – Performing normality in the face of crisis

This paper contextualises the research and production of Ballet, 2009, a filmed performance by Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen & Pavlo Kerestey). This project seeks to test the ideas of social choreography through the production of a filmed performance and an innovative engagement with the film archive at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, UK [MERL]. Social choreography describes a way of linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement to ideas about social order (Hewitt, 2005) providing a dynamic framework to explore the critical potentials and inter-relations between social and individual movement. Ballet engages with recent histories of rural filmmaking, linking everyday farming movements with the aesthetics of dance. Starting point is a series of archival films, made for British farmers as a means both for information and for propaganda, to provide warnings of contagion and nuclear catastrophe, describing procedure and instruction in the case of emergency. Performed by rural extras (local farmers and their families), asked to re-perform their own everyday lives in the rural landscape, these everyday performances of normality establish the scene for an imminent crisis.

Gestures and movements observed in these films were re-scripted into a new choreography of movement for camera. Filmed in a rural farming setting, a mixed group of dancers and non-dancers engages with specific filmic references, embedded in a visual narrative. The occurring movements increasingly reflect the dancers distance to the historical film material. This project also features a new collaboration with Canadian actor and director Michele Sereda.