Category: Media Installation

Critical Path is a choreographic research and development centre for dance artists in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. In September 2010, using the dichotomy of outside / inside as it relates to both body and architecture, Alan Schacher and Mike Leggett experimented with the multiplication of space and presence to generate looped choreography-image systems.The methodology alluded to historical cinema and sideshow through experimentation with camera obscura, shadows, silhouettes and auras.

An interdisciplinary, company devised promenade performance, led by John Downie (writer, performer, project coordinator), with Mike Leggett (video), Richard Storer (computer systems), Startled Insects (sound), Keith Tippett (piano, and musicians), The Playwrights Company & performers including: Pauline Battson, Kit Edwards, Liz Dbecchi, Canoe, Liz Fjelle (design), Kate McNab (actor), Tony Robinson (writer, actor), A.C.H. Smith (writer), Pat van Twest (writer, performer). Funding: The Playwrights Company & Gulbenkian Foundation. Developed and produced at Watershed Media Arts Centre, Bristol, UK.

A film by Mike Leggett of an event at Angela Flowers Gallery produced by Ian Breakwell during 1971 in which a group of labourers shovelled earth over the course of an ‘8-hour day’, to celebrate the first anniversary of the gallery. On the second floor of the gallery, each man continuously shovelled earth onto the adjacent man’s mound of earth, while at the same time and by coincidence, the Apollo astronauts were digging up rock samples on the surface of the moon. While every TV shop window showed live footage of the activities on the moon, the media installation relayed the event via CCTV to their street-level window. Gradually through the course of the day, as the all-white gallery space was reduced to a sea of mud, the pictures relayed from each event became almost indistinguishable from each other. The 16mm film record was restored to digital video in 2003.