Static Steps

Marcelo Spinelli: Was there a sense, in your earlier work such as Whistle, of giving a kind of structure to something?

Georgina Starr: Yes. It was something that you couldn't capture at all. Even taking a photo of it didn't really capture it, but then by making another thing out of it, like a sound, it really did keep hold of it. It was like keeping hold of something that was almost impossible to keep hold of. Then, alongside the whistle piece I was working on, I first started with video. I was making the arrows out of tissue paper and using some acetate at the time, and I noticed that when I pulled acetate under tissue paper the tissue paper jumped up and down. It was static. And I thought it would be quite interesting to try and use that, so I made those two little figures and I videoed it. I charged the acetate - you know how it goes quite static when you put a balloon on your head or something? - and I held it over these figures and they moved. And so it's like these two figures dancing. And again it was completely chaotic; it happened so fast...

MS: And what was the name of that piece?

GS: That was Static Steps. In real time it happened so fast that you couldn't really see it. It just went fffffffffffff and was finished. So I tried to video it and then I slowed the video down; and then I could watch it and it became this amazing sort of movement that they made in slow motion. Everything was really intricate and they became like real things. I recorded it on video and then I wrote down every movement they made, so, say if one moved its leg up and kicked to the right, I would note that down. It was like noting down a dance. And I got a guy with a very British BBC accent to read out the description of the dance.

MS: To do a commentary, like in Come Dancing?

GS: Yes. It was really like that. I showed the piece so that you walked down a corridor and you could hear his voice saying, "Number one: The Static Step. The dance begins with two partners..." And so he was describing a dance, but it was a really stupid dance that was impossible to do - the partner flicks the other one out of view and she does a three point turn and falls down - it was this amazing, really crazy, dance. Then, down the corridor I had footstep drawings, like you get in those books. [I had] noted all the dances, so you had the drawings of all the dances with arrows and how to do it, and at the end of the corridor you saw the video. So in effect you saw it backwards: you saw all the build-up to it, which came after it really. And then you saw the video at the end. So I think when people heard it they were trying to figure out, is it really possible to do this? And wondering, looking at the steps, and thinking God, it'll be really hard. A lot of people that were interested in dance said that maybe it is possible to re-enact it with real people, but it would be some sort of acrobatic display. I wasn't so interested in making that with real people.

MS: But again there is this sense of looking at something that you can't control, more or less.

GS: Yes, the chaos of these little figures that is in a way nothing. I mean, if I hadn't noticed it, it wouldn't have existed in a way. It was just impossible to keep hold of unless I used video or some sort of recording device. Even photographing it didn't work. It had to be video, and again really concentrating on it and noting down everything about it. And I gave all the dances names and numbers so it really fits to this piece, the collection. I've always been obsessed with giving everything names and numbers and categorizing everything; I'm always making a small history of something that is quite insignificant in a way.

MS: And making something sort of real. It's a bit like when you have a dream and you tell the dream, and once you tell it becomes more palpable.

GS: Yes. And you write it down and it becomes much more of a real thing.

MS: And the words you use, the specific words you use to describe it, also become very important.

GS: I was quite interested in making a new sort of language out of it as well. I could use new names for the movements and because these movements didn't exist in real life, I could create names for them. So I was really excited about creating a whole new way of reading a dance, or reading a movement, by having new names for it as well. That's something at the time I was really interested in.