In No Time

A retrospective of ideas in the choreography of Polly Motley  


2014 Helen Day Art Center, Stowe, VT.  Video by Molly Davies with John Jasperse, Diane Madden, Shelley Senter and Willow Wonder 
from Rachel Moore, the curator at the Helen Day Arts Center :

"This project is one that Polly and I developed as a concept - to use the exhibition space as a platform for a choreographic installation and an open working studio. This brings to life the exhibition space in an avant-garde fashion that defies the traditions of scheduled performance-based events. The model is exhibition as open studio, where Motley combines live performance, installation, exhibition of artifacts, and public participation in a continually evolving and breathing exhibit.
This type of exhibition is at the forefront in contemporary curatorial practice, and is generous and participatory from a public standpoint."
Collaborators included dancers Diane Madden, Lisa Nelson, John Jasperse, Stacy Spence, Shelley Senter, Avi Waring, Willow Wonder and Paul Besaw, composers Sean Clute and John King, video artist Molly Davies, and video programmer and cameraman, Philip Roy.

In No Time was a retrospective of ideas in the choreography of Polly Motley. The focus of this “installation of artists” were the ideas of Motley’s 30+ year career that continued to stimulate new work. In mining these artistic threads to create new work, the team of regional and national artists presented the creative processes and experiments used to create new work as well as new work itself.

In No Time included open “studio-in-the-gallery” process, intermedia performances, talks with the public, lecture-demonstrations and an exhibit of video, costumes, choreographic scores and contextualizing print. These activities contextualized Motley's work in relation to  other contemporary and historical  ideas in dance, video and installation art. They presented the highly disciplined craft inherent in Motley’s choreography for Count 25 (1987), Drawing From the Body(1999), Dancing the Numbers (2004), and Video Portrait (2013)and examined how these dances related to some current practices in contemporary performance making. In No Time shared the creative processes of devising maps and scores, of projecting video images, and the interplay between them.

The compositional rigor, content and poetics of the elements of In No Time--video, new music, lighting, dance-- created a meditation on impermanence and the experience of time. Motley and collaborators are not young; their eyes are set on the “water flowing underground,”  on  “the beauty of the world is enough” and on the graceful actions of ordinary life. These were the currents of In No Time.

A companion essay was integral to this project.  Writer Sara Smith researched related artistic forms and ideas, interviewed artists and audience and worked with Motley and curator, Rachel Moore, to enhance our understanding of experimental performance-making.