Johanna Billing, I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009)

A pendulum sways from the scroll of a typewriter, where a violence of mechanical tapping marks the prelude to the piece's percussion based music. Bodies absorb and digest sound, guiding it into different guises. Dancers scale a giant stage of steps, inverting the amphitheatre as audience becomes performer. We observe the interplay of conscious and unconscious movements - rapid eyes flicker as they analyse undulating limbs; a diamond shape is formed by adjoining fingers and thumbs (…) Stray dogs scavenge through barren waste lands, lone observers pause to contemplate movement, workmen strip space; each and every one plays an equal part in establishing the cohesive rhythm of this film.

Louisa Elderton

I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009) is based around the recording of a live choreography workshop involving amateur Romanian dancers and acting students at the Periferic 8 Biennial of Contemporary Art in Iasi, Romania in 2008. Led by renowned Swedish choreographer Anna Vnuk, with whom Billing last worked over a decade ago, there is no final performance as such: the resulting video weaves several days’ activity into a continuous process of live improvisation between choreographer, dancers and local musicians, watched by an audience who were free to come and go. The project was an attempt to explore, along with the participating individuals and the audience, what contemporary choreography can be, or means today, especially in the cultural context of the small city of Iasi where there are few opportunities to enter the field of contemporary dance. With a nod to choreographers like Yvonne Rainer's explorations of everyday movement, Billing investigates the sense of having a body and how we perform our being. Paying tender attention to small details, Billing focuses the mind on the social body - the body among others, the body aware of itself.

The work’s soundtrack is a combination of improvised live music performed at the event in Iasi, and a specially recorded interpretation of the song ‘My Heart’ (originally written and performed by the Swedish drum and vocal duo ‘Wildbirds & Peacedrums’ in 2009). The song is perhaps a tribute to a beating heart, but in this new context of a post-totalitarian country struggling to find new ways of relating the individual and society, it's also an ambiguous plaint for the lost rhythms of a disappeared social order. It's all more optimistic than it may sound, though - Billing treats her subjects with an unreserved warmth and tenderness; she's interested in performance as an experience and the potential it holds for exchange and learning, not as a crafted perfection. The final video was created through a lengthy post-production editing process, in which the dancers’ movements, the activities taking place around them, and the rhythm of the music are reconstructed into a new choreography – perhaps closer to the everyday struggles and surrounding obstacles than might first be imagined – including climbing over institutional structures and running through hierarchical corridors.

Produced in collaboration with Camden Arts Centre, London; Arnolfini, Bristol and Modern Art Oxford as part of the 3 Series: 3 artists, 3 spaces, 3 years, and in the frame of Periferic 8 - Art as Gift Biennial for Contemporary Art Iasi, Romania, organized by Vector Association with support from IASPIS, Sweden.