take clothes for instance BOOK

OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS
The images which had been captured displayed Freya and I in
various states of dishevel as we tried unsuccessfully to push and
pull the clothing onto ourselves and each other. What struck me
most was this state of struggle in conflict with the selection of
clothes we had chosen. The emotional impact on me as I scanned
though these images was to make me feel uncomfortable. That I
was re-experiencing this feeling again in response to the
photographs was significant.
I’d recently been to see a performance at the Gulbenkian Theatre.
It was a physical performance piece called COAL by the Gary
Clarke Theatre Company which commemorated the anniversary
of the 1894 miners’ strike. There was something deeply
compelling about this performance. The sheer physicality and
energy was impressive as it was sustained throughout. Despite its
narrative and theatricality, underlying this there was something
primordial and visceral. This infected me on a physical level as I
witnessed the performers in states of conflict and struggle against
their enacted environment as they simulated being pressed into
the pit shaft and the narrow tunnels where lack of space caused
physical restrictions. Alongside this I also witnessed the
performers in states where their limbs were freed from their
restrictions and these frayed uncontrollably outwards from their
prior restraints. There was criss-crossing within the
moving composition of performers which created tensions,
cutting up the flow and interrupting the energy
and movement which producing redundancies despite efforts for
that energy to be thrown outwards. It also left me with the
feeling that I’d seen this type of performance elsewhere, and this
came to me later on that evening. In The Raft of Medusa by
Theodore Gericault similar struggles and conflicts were taking
place. When I looked at the publicity photographs for COAL it
struck me that these two distinctly different art forms had arrived
at a similar aesthetic and were communicating very similar
messages on the level of affect.