“Paige Barnes is myriad forms of poetry in motion, and a multidisciplinary creative force to be reckoned with.”
— Tony Kay, The Sunbreak
In a three-month residency, Paige Barnes directed three linked but unique interactive transdisciplinary performances exploring the intersection of dance and East Asian medicine traditions.
At the Olympic Sculpture Park, Paige first explored how dance can reflect a person’s story inspired by the pulse listening method of East Asian medicine. Paige placed her fingertips on the inside of a guest’s wrist, listened to their pulse, and then improvised a dance expressing its felt story. Over the course of the residency, she created 23 pulse-based dances for park guests in collaboration with poetry, animation, music, and video.
Bridging Pulse
The first performance in the series, Bridging Pulse explored how a person’s pulse can be visually and sonically expressed through dance, animation, poetry, and music. For the performance Paige created a bespoke structure derived from the pulse readings during the residency to improvise from. From the memory of the guests’ pulses Paige danced. In response, Stefan Gruber animated live, Evan Flory-Barnes played the bass and sang, and Vanessa DeWolf read poetry. Bridging Pulse introduced SAM audiences to the pulse as creative source. The performance asked how a pulse reading expresses our collective nature.
“Paige Barnes is a movement artist whose dancing is sinewy and soft. Even the angles she creates from ankle to elbow appear like feather tips, tilting and adjusting to the surrounding atmosphere.”
— Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, Seattle Art Museum SAM Blog
Amplifying Pulse
The second performance in the series, Amplifying Pulse was performed by eleven dancers and three musicians and e xplored how to amplify an individual pulse into a felt collective experience. The evening began with eleven dancers holding simultaneous pulse readings for eleven audience members in three rounds while guests watched. The rounds were categorized by phases of the moon – the new moon, the gibbous moon, and the full moon. When the last round ended, with the full moon, thirty-three individual pulses had been listened to; they had been danced; they had been seen. After, the evening shifted into a group improvisation between dance, music, and poetry using the memory of the audiences’ pulse from the beginning as the score.
“In Interstitial Pulse, audience members will experience a contemplative, intimate performance intended to open up connections to emotions and feelings internally, and also to form a collective bond with other observers and the performers.”
— Philippa Myler, Seattle Dances
Interstitial Pulse
The final performance was held in March as the climate was transitioning from winter to spring -a moment in time that represents moving from death to birth. Interstitial Pulse is about the transition in between these phases of life - a space that is undefined and unseen. It connects the pulse to something more universal – the rhythms of the natural world. As seen in the seasons, life passes through the phases of birth, growth, full expression, retreat, and death, then to be repeated again. Interstitial Pulse honors the transition between death and birth as represented by the climate of winter and spring. It was dedicated to Marc Carter, a friend and artistic collaborator who had recently transitioned to the afterlife while Paige was in residence at SAM.
#pulseperformanceproject
Olympic Sculpture Park
Artist in Residence
January-March, 2017
#pulseperformanceproject is a video project documenting the pulse listening session with twenty three park visitors. Every dance was filmed on an iPhone by park visitors, friends and artists, then edited and shared on social media as a one-minute dance. Documenting the substrate of the residency, Paige compiled twenty-three dances into a dance-video film, which screened at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, 2017
View the dances on instagram
Pulse Performance Project
Seattle Art Museum
Director, Dancer: Paige Barnes
Poet: Vanessa DeWolf
Musician: Evan Flory-Barnes
Animators: Stefan Gruber and Sage Mailman
Lighting designer: Amiya Pennebaker-Brown
Videographer: Jeff Curtis
Photographer: Jen Au and Bruce Clayton Tom