New film, The Dress, showing at Dulwich Picture Gallery LATE
21 Feb 2008, 6.30 – 10pm
£5, includes entry to St Sebastian exhibition and all the featured entertainments More
The Dress is a small film, a miniature, that tackles big themes in a tiny frame. It is a series of paintings that develop a story through image and music.
It demands that you ask:
• Is this a story of human experience – the best and worst of humanity?
• Is it a tale about humanity’s fear of ‘the other?’
• What is the significance of wearing The Dress?
The Dress is a narrative visual poem, full of very beautiful, powerful and often disturbing images. Its theme questions the world we inhabit and in particular addresses the issues of violence and revenge.
“The film made me think how thin the veneer of civilised behaviour can really be and how readily it can be broken. It is a powerful film and one that lingers in the mind.” Elizabeth McManus Development Alternatives
Watch the trailer for The Dress
Find out about LATES at Dulwich Picture Gallery
The Dress takes the audience on a journey though an extraordinarily beautiful world of summer dreams into the nightmare world that runs parallel to the meadows full of flowers and dances in the moonlight. The Dress journeys through the best and worst of human experience; but in its most barbaric encounter discovers the possibility of redemption and hope. The film is enhanced by the spectacular cinematography of Will Hutchinson and the specially devised music score by Jackie Walduck, Veryan Weston and Alison Blunt. The art direction by Tricia Donnison and Julieann Heskin references contemporary art works.
How The Dress was developed
Maggie started developing a non-dialogue approach to storytelling some years ago inspired by a series of workshops with Yugoslavian director Mladen Materik. Her own work then evolved with young actors as well as trainee theatre designers. The work encompassed elements that affect the human condition: light, space, smell, touch, proximity to others, sexuality, relationship to objects, climate and activity. Looking at works by artists such as Vemeer helped put the work in the context of both performance and fine art.
The workshop approach would involve a group of performers or artists in a room surrounded with arbitrary props, furniture and materials that demanded explanation. Very slowly the participants would start to build ‘relationships’ with their surrounding material world which would then encompass fellow participants. The work demands ‘impulse’ rather than the more intellectual imagination. We are all creatures of the world we inhabit and our physical imagination is often blocked by the intellect.
One of the early workshops, 11 years ago, took place at the time of the Dunblane massacres. Somehow, without any conversation about the incident, extraordinary images started to appear during the improvisation work: a man violently crushing a child’s shoe under his foot; a desperate woman throwing her dress over a man’s head – he had to know what it was to be ‘her’, feel her grief. Images that stayed and often appeared in later work.
We are a society struggling to deal not only with violence but our desire to perpetrate violence in revenge for violence; 9-11, Guantanamo, Iraq, Sierra Leone ….. The list goes on. And in Liverpool, where part of The Dress was shot? Jamie Bulger and Anthony Walker. The one inciting the most barbaric calls for vengeance and the other inspiring a call for forgiveness by his mother Gee Walker.
The Dress has already travelled in its short life: villages in El Salvador and Derbyshire, Kars in NE Turkey where it was selected for the European Film Festival on Wheels, Bakewell Arts Festival and showings in Manchester where it was used to both raise funds and promote the work of ‘Mothers against Violence.’ Now Dulwich Picture Gallery.
What next?
Showings at other galleries, film and digital art festivals, colleges and universities where the film could be used as a ‘tool’ for discussions around the issues raised in The Dress. The DVDs will also be sold @ £7 from the website: www.thedress.org.uk and the sales will continue to raise funds for Mothers against Violence.
Maggie is also interested in running workshops or seminars in conjunction with a showing of the film.
Contact Maggie Ford maggie@springrites.co.uk 01629 636 189
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