The work centres around an improvised durational dance and sound performance

that was displayed underground in The Crypt Gallery, London. The original film was

projected onto the stone walls, behind the immersive installation piece, and re-recorded –

metamorphosing into a regenerative work. The stills were captured synchronously.

unheld/unfold is inspired by our individual encounters with personal transformation;

ephemerality, resistance and surrender, yet is documented in a visceral, communal

experience which lands in both the visual and sonic realms.

Certain motifs recur: enigmatic hands offer, grasp, reach; feet walk like a revenant

amongst the graves; rope physically restricts movement – binding and creating boundaries.

The fabric installation reflects personal layers and inner ghosts, which is further

emphasised by the central image of pointe shoes. Shoes are a familiar artistic symbol of

the many roles we each adopt over a lifetime, and this object is a nod to Fi’s roots in

Classical Ballet. They symbolise an identity once held exclusively by the artist. In an act of

personal reflection, Fi revisits the feeling of dancing in these shoes after five years. This

performance highlights the artist’s journey and is an acknowledgement or tribute to the self

that is shed.

Birthed from the interweaving of past and present, this work holds mortality, memory,

and metamorphosis at its core. It explores what it means to be a trespasser within one’s

body and questions how we could be collectively perceived as trespassers.

As a dancer, your main tool, your instrument – the body - morphs and reshapes

across your lifetimes. It subtly becomes anew each day. Using this concept as well as the

spontaneity of improvisation and the images of the ballet shoes, this work plays with  ideas of identity. Seeing the shoes dragged across the floor and hung from rope

subverts their traditional use. They are danced in on the cobbled, stone floor of the crypt –

an unconventional and technically challenging location for them to be worn. Taking the

shoes out of their usual context abstracts their purpose and subverts the gendered

strictures of Ballet. Similarly, duality emerges from the panning audio, the rhythmic

collision of light and shadow and the diptych – the symmetry of two screens is juxtaposed

by disorientating camera angles, revealing a paradoxical world of strange beauty.

unheld/unfold, in essence, is a retrospective of a past life and a meditation upon the

non-linear growth and inevitable change of any artist, or indeed person. Seeing

performance through a lens of ceremony, this project celebrates autonomy in the dance. In

the unconscious accident. In the transience of being alive, the symbiosis between the

transient landscape around us and within our ephemeral bodies. 

Always changing, always moving.

 

credits:

Dance Artist & Producer: Fi Caspia @fi.caspia 
Visual Researcher: Džiuginta Mažulytė @laughingjoy 
Sound Artist: Bilge Nur Yilmaz @tendertwin