Two figures re-edit themselves across a wall, back and forth, cut, reverse, re-wind, a constant disruption performed on their bodies. In Sheena McGrandles’ FIGURED the main stage element, a wall that is a reoccurring element within her work, functions as a screen, a display, a backdrop, an object and a choreographic device. The live sound collection of field recordings from a fridge to a demonstration is similarly ruptured and cut up in time, creating a sonic scape that gives friction, drive and amplification to detail. The handling of time causes multiple narratives to appear and disappear. Illogical relations are made and remade. The series of emerging situations illicit a kind of cruising, but it is their insistence on detail that reads as perverse. FIGURED is based on a reduced trajectory of ten seconds that is hyper edited and hacked live over a time frame of forty minutes. It is a study into the mediated body that focuses on a complex composition and execution of the physical exposing the absurdity and artificiality of the everyday gesture. FIGURED gets stuck in the detail and insists in the seeing of it again and again.

Sheena McGrandles

Sheena McGrandles is a dancer and choreographer born in Northern Ireland. McGrandles completed her BA at the Laban Centre London and later studied at the HZT/UdK Berlin, Germany, where she finished her MA in Solo Dance Authorship with a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. She works in different contexts such as theatre / stage, education and independent art and culture projects. McGrandles’ current group of works explores illogical intimacies and radical temporalities as a means of detailed exploration and exaggeration of movement. She has worked with several artists such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Isabelle Schad, Daniel Kok, Tove Sahlin, Zinzi Buchanan and Claire Sobottke. In addition to her work as an artist, she is one of the founding members of neuehäute, where she works on the development of new interdisciplinary platforms and formats for the independent scene in Berlin. She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.