N o o r N u y t e n +

Collaboration with Stefania PetroulaStefania Petroula

Ching-I Chang Bigelow

A Body’s Time

private piece, instant composition, performer

As a participatory visitor - witness - of this private piece, you will be asked to follow the pulse of your heartbeat. Simultaneously, the performer is improvising on the rhythm and speed of the ‘parallel timezone’ created by their own heartbeat.

For contemporary dance and instant composition, the rhythm and speed of time is one of the main factors that make up the shape of the movement (together with space, body and weight). After experimenting for a year with movement practitioners, starting with the watch running on the heartbeat, we found a way to internalize the rhythm and speed of one’s own heartbeat.
For this project, the heartbeat is the time, the clock. The tempo of the heartbeat becomes the speed at which the beat is counted and where the movement starts.

A Body’s Time was premiered in the inaugural exhibition in Richmond, curated next to Felix Gozalex Torres’s piece “Untitled” (1989/1990) from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s two identical stacks of white paper - one with the words, “Nowhere better than this place,” and the other reading, “Somewhere better than this place”.