Robbinschilds (USA)

The Physics Room / Arts Centre International Artists in Residence
19 November - 19 December, 2009

Blending dance, performance art and visual art, robbinschilds—New Yorkers Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs—create visually engaging artworks that explore the range of relationships and interactions possible between humans and architecture or the natural landscape.

This final residency of 2009 for the Arts Centre’s Artist in Residence (AIR) Programme brings robbinschilds to Christchurch and is a partnership between the Arts Centre and The Physics Room, with additional support provided by The Canterbury Community Trust and the Embassy of the United States of America.

While based at the Arts Centre , robbinschilds will work on new performance and film projects utilising their movement vocabularies and processes. Meantime, their colour and sound-laden work, C.L.U.E. (Color Location Ultimate Experience) will be installed and adapted to gallery space in The Physics Room (25 November–20 December 2009).

C.L.U.E. is video and performance work that is constantly in flux, adapting and changing to the spaces it occupies. A collaborative work between robbinschilds, A.L. Steiner (Chicks on Speed), AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski, C.L.U.E. sees robbinschilds interpret and investigate a range of spaces—a beach, the city, a car wrecking yard, a forest, rock formations in remote locations—with their bodies. C.L.U.E. reads like a fusion between performance art, contemporary dance documentation and music-video that is full of joie de vivre, subtle humour and play, gently questioning how as humans we shape and interpret the earth.

Since its 2007 premiere at Taxter & Spengemann gallery in New York, C.L.U.E has been hosted by galleries and venues around the USA, Europe and China.

The Arts Centre and The Physics Room are developing a range of public events which will take place in the Arts Centre, The Physics Room and around the city. These will include artist talks, a discussion panel / forum bringing together ideas about dance, human geography, performance, visual art and architecture, along with performances and workshops.

With thanks to:

Biographies

robbinschilds was formed by choreographers, Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003. The company creates performance and video works for diverse venues including the stage, gallery or “site”. Focused on presenting highly visual time-based works, robbinschilds explores the juncture between architecture or place, and human interaction.

robbinschilds have been presenting live dance and video works since 2003 at notable venues in New York like P.S.122, The New Museum and The Kitchen. David Byrne’s world tour this year featured robbinschilds’ choreography. Their most recent work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, premiered at The Kitchen in New York in April this year.

Their’ performance work has been presented at various venues in the United States of America including: Dance Theater Workshop; PS 122; The Kitchen; The New Museum; Movement Research at Judson Church; Triskelion Arts; DanceSpace Project at St. Mark’s Church; PS 1; The Whitney Museum at Altria and the Autumn Skate Bowl; The Marfa Ballroom; Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Salon; and internationally at The Donau Festival (Krems, Austria). In addition to their live work, robbinschilds’ video art has been exhibited at Vaska Emanouilova Gallery Sofia, Bulgaria (2009); Zendai MoMa Shanghai, China (2008); The New Museum, New York, (2008); Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain (2007); Taxter & Spengemann (2007); LACE: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2007); and was screened as part of BAM’s 2007 Next Wave series.

robbinschilds has worked with the art collective Chicks on Speed and collaborated with Brooklyn-based duo Japanther, on the rock spectacle Dinosaur Death Dance commissioned by the Performa 07 festival. In 2008, robbinschilds was commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne on his world concert tour.

Recent company activities include a 2009 residency at Mt. Tremper Arts and an installation and performance of C.L.U.E. in September at Pica’s TBA Festival. In November 2009, robbinschilds journeys to Christchurch, New Zealand to complete a month long residency and begin work on a new film and performance project assisted by The Physics Room and The Arts Centre, and with additional support from The Canterbury Community Trust and the Embassy of the United States of America.

Background information about robbinschilds and C.L.U.E. (Colour Location Ultimate Experience)

Founded in 2003 on choreographers Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs’ shared interest in performance and installation, robbinschilds is focused on presenting highly visual dance works which explore the intersection between architecture and human movement.

With a particular attraction to empty places, public spaces, geological formations, travel and psychedelic filigree, our intricately structured movement vocabulary traverses inanimate, human and extra-pedestrian states. In a style that is obsessive, persistent and often humorous, robbinschilds' observations of the human imprint on the world are revealed.

A movement-based video piece by robbinschilds and A.L. Steiner, C.L.U.E. uses original choreographed language as a vehicle to explore the natural and human-made landscape. It embodies a poignant freedom in the unification of humanity and the vast natural world, juxtaposed against the contemporary tendency toward consumerism, waste and disposable architecture. The variegated landscapes featured in the film express the potential iteration of geology, with the performers costumed in the seven colours of the rainbow, which represent the wavelengths of the visual spectrum. The natural variety of locations provide a rich array of environments spanning from salt flats and high desert to redwood forests and rocky beaches, through dry river basins and vast parking lots, to suburban swimming pools and green lawns.

Utilising a focus on the distinctive partnership between the two characters in the film, Robbins and Childs are portrayed as supremely united, creating a bond through which their shared experience of a vibrant colour field is symbiotic with one another and their surrounding environments. The duo is repeatedly reincarnated in each colour of the rainbow, making their path across these symbolic landscapes and implementing unsuspected secret passageways between the geographical and historical distances. Emerging from the ocean into the Home Depot, falling through an office park esplanade into the desert to hand out their memos among the yucca. The video references the grand trope of the great American road trip, as it has been exercised again and again, from Lewis and Clark, to Jack Kerouac, from the 49'ers, to the Okies. From the digging of the Eerie Canal to the paving of the LA River, this is a journey we travel as Americans: making our way west, and pulling the east with us as we go.

“C.L.U.E. is the gateway to experiencing the ultimate in any surrounding. A living collective organ, molten, expanding and contracting as it responds to its immediate environment. Curious and open. Red, orange, yellow, forest, aqua, royal, majestic and purple. Guided by the celestial powers of rainbow and light. Finds intrigue not only in the beauty of rock, ash and earth, lake and sea, moss, leaf and open sky, but in the whine of debris, lyric of cement, sorrow of mall and hum of highway. Fluid as water or lava or blood or air, moves through tiny gullies and grooves, tastes to know but leaves behind only what was already there.” —robbinschilds

(Image stills from C.L.U.E, 2007. Images courtesy of the artists and Taxter & Spengemann Gallery, New York)

For more information, images and interviews, contact:

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www.physicsroom.org.nz
www.robbinschilds.com