PASSAGE TO A DISUSED DIVINE

Choreographic film

A film by Marcus Behrens and Isabel Rocamora
Choreographed by Isabel Rocamora

'Highest viewer rating' Arte Tv 2002 Tracks season

Conceived as an anti-gravity performance commissioned by Colchester Arts Centre, U.K, Passage has been re-worked as a broadcast film itself commissioned by Arte Tv, Germany. The location, St. Mary's at the Walls, was once medieval and is today a Victorian church built in 1872. In the early 1980's, no longer a place of worship, it was opened as Colchester Arts Centre.

Passage proposes a temporary re-sacralisation of the building. The piece explores themes of life, death, transcendence and transformation. Its aesthetic is centred on the iconic relationship between the physical and the mystical so present in religious imagery from East to West. Choreography, music and costume reflect an eclectic mix of both traditions.

Passage is a site-specific work which invites the spectator to consider the building's architecture in relationship to the suspended body: solemn arches surrounded by brightly coloured vegetative motifs, epic and delicately stained glass windows, an exotically mosaiqued pulpit... A female voice descending from the apex acompanies four  bodies dialoguing with columns and windows, arches and saints, roof tops and altar features.

A piece of anti-gravity to momentarily lure the divine out of its hiding place. A meeting point between the spiritual and the spectacular.