The Saturated Moment

(bare text - design to follow!)

The Saturated Moment is an exploration of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves (1931). In Woolf's novel each character is construed by images and turns of phrase that register particular impressions of the natural world. This dance piece reveals the physical basis for those impressions, creating patterns of live action and recorded sound that distinguish between the six characters but also, in the manner of the novel, dissolve those characters into each other as a single event is seen cubistically from a number of different perspectives. Altogether, the piece suggests an understanding of time in which each person's present moment is 'saturated' by impressions of the wider world that others have experienced in the past and future. Nigel Stewart.

Thanks to Nigel Stewart and Dominique Bulgin, without whom there would be no piece, and to Steve Benner for massive technical support and a couple of crucial gestures. The Saturated Moment is the result of an intensive research residency under the Artists' Programme of Chisenhale Dance Space during August 2006 and subsequent work in Lancaster.

• Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia, at the Bratislava in Movement Festival, 8 October 2006
• Chisenhale Dance Space, London, England, a sharing in the Artists' Programme, 26 November 2006
• Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, England, as part of Ludus Dance : Dance Cuts 2006, 2 December 2006
• Accepted for The 17th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, Art Education and Internationalism, at Miami university of Oxford, Ohio, USA, 7-10 June 2007, but not presented due to clashing commitments
• Accepted for the Performing Literatures conference, Leeds University, 29 June - 1 July 2007
• Accepted for The 1st Annual Symposium in Systems Research in the Arts and Humanities: "On Choreographies in Music, Visual and Performing Arts, and Environmental Design" In conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics, Baden-Baden, Germany, 30 July - 4 August 2007