Wendy Houstoun
Class description
LDI 2010 - LANGUAGE AS MUSIC
I have spent a substantial amount of my creative life working around the relationship between text and movement. Historically, I have been keen to make meaning clear and have used language very much as content and a loose kind of storytelling. More recently I have become interested in incoherence, in the rhythm of different languages and the emptiness of a lot of the words used in government, arts and political documents.
I have recently been working in Norway where I met composer Henrik Hellstinius, he sees language as a sound score, treating the composition of language as a musical and rhythmic construction. He gave so much information there was no time to absorb it all and I am urgently want to try working with the many ideas he threw out in relation to my own pre-occupations.
I aim to arrive at a series of studies over the three days using his process of working for 20 minutes to arrive at a 2 minute study- focusing on different ways sound relates to other forms (movement, another sound, an image).
Workshop : Join Wendy Houstoun in her creative process researching some of the ideas she has been working on and be part of a choir she will try and conduct.
Biography
Wendy Houstoun is a London based artist who has been working with experimental movement and theatre forms since 1980. She has maintained a practise that moves between devised company involvement, collaborative projects and solo practise.
Her work with companies : Ludus Dance Company, Lumiere and Son Theatre Company, DV8 Physical Theatre, Forced Entertainment, Gary Stevens run parallel with collaborations with performance artists, dancers, film makers and writers : Rose English , Lucy Fawcett, Nigel Charnock, Tim Etchells , David Hinton, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion.
Her solo work weaves a rich strand of text through a moving narrative and in some cases, employ self created video work.