An Obscure Camera: New work developed by University of Chichester dance students premieres this month
Dance students at the University of Chichester are taking part in a unique intergenerational site-based digital installation project this month. The MA Dance students are working with Flexer & Sandiland, a digital dance company, to develop a new piece which will be shown at the University’s Chichester campus and at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne.
Yael Flexer and Nic Sandiland said: “The fascination with Camera Obscura has captured audience imagination drawing people worldwide from Victorian times to the present day. The spectacle of entering a dark room through which to witness and actively peer out to the surrounding landscape is both theatrically enticing and technically mysterious. An Obscure Camera develops these ideas for a 21st-century context. Evoking aspects of contemporary surveillance culture, the installation gives us the power to explore, seek, and inspect anything and anyone we find interesting. In doing so we navigate the fine line between observer and voyeur, physically enacting the choices made by the countless algorithms that analyse our daily lives.”
The work includes an intergenerational cast made up of the MA dance student cohort, Flexer & Sandiland company members alongside the company’s community and over 60 class participants. An Obscure Camera will be informally performed on site at Chichester on Monday 14 October from 4pm-6pm (Dance Studio 1) and at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne (2-3 November). It will also be exhibited at InSpace Gallery, University of Edinburgh (23-30 November).
Yael Flexer is a Reader in Dance at the University and Artistic Director of the University’s postgraduate dance company, mapdance. Nic Sandiland is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Middlesex University. Flexer & Sandiland are a partner company at South East Dance, Brighton. The project is funded by Arts Council England.