Introduction to the I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm book

Bruce Haines

Over the last decade Johanna Billing’s videos have reflected on routine, rehearsal and ritual. Through a deft observational style, she places subtle emphasis on both the fragility of individual performance and the power of collective experience. Billing herself has also said that she is obsessed by circularity and retrospection.

Billing’s new video work I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009), is based around the recording of a dance choreography workshop in Iasi, Romania. Led by Swedish choreographer Anna Vnuk, with whom Billing last worked over a decade ago, there is no final performance as such. Instead the resulting video links several days’ activity into a continuous process of live improvisation between choreographer, dancers and local musicians which was originally watched by an audience who were free to come and go as they pleased.

 For Billing, the project was an attempt to explore, along with the participating individuals and audience, what contemporary dance can be, or means today, especially in relation to a developing country and economy such as Romania. The work becomes about movement in general and choreography coming closer to everyday life than might at first be imagined.

Ever since her video Graduate Show (1999) in which Billing’s contemporaries at art school danced to a 1980’s soundtrack music, sound and rhythm have woven a continuous thread through her video works. Even Project for a Revolution (2000), though without a musical score, has rhythm at its heart, with ambient sounds of a regurgitating photocopier and the restless rustle of young people apparently waiting around for something to happen.

Young people have frequently become a focus of her camera’s ‘eye’, despite each work having hugely divergent contexts and content as their premise. The methodologies Billing employs turn film making into projects where the participants are an intrinsic part of their process. So not only the dancers, actors and audience constitute the participants for I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm but also the musicians, percussionists, a marimba and piano player, as well as film crew, sound technician and stills photographer.

These constituent parts of Billing’s videos – their people, locations, activities, recording, editing and sounds – come together in a lengthy post-production process, making the whole not only greater than the sum of the individual parts but far from the original course or trajectory the project set out upon. Billing acknowledges that her editing is approached in an often rhythmical way itself– just as music can convey atmosphere, so can the nature of the edit. She exploits these editorial ‘cuts’ and the bits in-between, those that you cannot see, but feel. 1

Like many of her contemporaries, Billing’s interests are wide, taking in philosophy, music and social science as well as influence from her artist-friends’ practices. In the past, Johanna’s work has been acknowledged as being imbued with an appreciation of her native Sweden’s recent history and in particular the failure of her generation to connect with politics and the importance of social democracy in the same way that her parents generation had. It is this co-joining of the political with the collaborative that often results in her work being defined as ‘participative’. In fact, as the accompanying interview with Iasi-based writer Cristian Nae illustrates, who also witnessed the ‘performance’ she created for the Biennial, she is more often than not creating an open structure in which people function in a way that is much more democratic. Billing stages situations where something may or may not take place. Her skill lies in combining the choreography of the individuals whose trust she earns with facilitating their freedom to perform naturally, bringing the whole together through her clever editing. The subsequently unfolding dramas hold the viewer enthralled, and not infrequently moved. Perhaps the possibility of watching people fail, or struggling to do something not entirely natural to them, whether it be singing in a foreign language in Magical World (2005), contemplating a high dive in Where She Is At (2001), or learning to sail in This Is How We Walk On The Moon (2007), is a cathartic experience in itself. Either way, Johanna Billing brings a unique perspective to, and forges an emotional connection with, the viewers of her films because of the investment she makes in the people who feature in them. Certainly there is never one particular ‘group’ as such that she works with; indeed Billing has said that she would like to expand further on what we mean by collectively gathering people and defining them in this way, as institutions often gently encourage artists to do, whether by gender, nationality, their shared interests or the fact they simply take the same bus to work. Perhaps as she has intimated herself, the most interesting place to occupy as a ‘participant’ is that space between the collective experience of producing an art work and the private experience of seeing it in the context of an art gallery or cinema.

As well as music often being a central part of the atmosphere of her videos, Billing is also involved with music production, running an independent music label Make It Happen which releases records and organizes concerts. So appropriately, if a ‘coda’ defines the concluding passage or movement of a piece of music, then this publication, more programme than catalogue, functions similarly for I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm.

1 Johanna Billing, Look Behind Us A Blue Sky, 2007, Carole Bertinet, ‘Editing Is

Musical’, pp114-115