Performance
Generator Projects, Dundee 2022
Songs for Work is an exhibition of new work by artist and writer Beth Dynowski, devised, written and performed with Saoirse Amira Anis, Dan Cox and Rowan Heggie. The show uses a process of performance and writing to explore how we shape and are shaped by our socio-economic conditions. The collaborative writing and recording undertaken by the four, installed as audio and a transcript, weaves together personal experiences and family histories of work. It explores how material conditions are experienced, felt and lived through by individuals, families and communities and how the body holds this.
The spaces form an environment where oral history, song, sculpture, audio, performance and fragmented, distributed forms of narrative come together to create a living document of social history as it writes itself from generation to generation. The performer’s voices and experiences fill the space while their physical bodies exist between a space of performing and not performing, of working and not working, of being at rest and not being at rest. How does doing relate to being, to the value of a life? What is the remainder after work, rest and play? Through the process of sharing recordings and writing of what we had learned from the working lives we grew up around, the performance foregrounds what the presence or absence of the body brings to bear.
Objects from the domestic sphere and workplace, alongside sculptures fabricated for the show make both concrete and abstract references to bodies, tools and technology. The radio plays white noise and at times is used by the performers, introducing an element of chance sound on a range of poetic planes. A noise used to lull crying babies to sleep, to use as background noise to human activity, it also points to a complex social history of creativity within the workplace and as a marker of class and taste with the turn of a dial.
Emotional states become concrete, and concrete conditions become abstracted. The writing contains accounts of moving between realms of social class, code-switching, illness, dreaming, everyday experiences of work, early experiences of caregivers, friendships and relationships, and the relationship to self and body. It contains a small snapshot of conditions that are shifting, undergoing perpetual change, and those which historically persist.
Songs for Work II looks at human experience within the context of late stage capitalism as it is lived and felt, of mental, physical and psychic struggles and at the same time the care, tenderness and triumphs of those caught between the need to make a living and the desire to live differently.