JESSIE ROBERTS-SMITH
SPINDRIFT
Spindrift is a live performance solo work that explores the physicality of becoming the sea. Choreographed to roughly to 24 minutes long, two tide cycles (each minute representing an hour), the movement, sound and projection build in intensity and subside like the tide.
The dancer begins with the physical memory of being on deck and the ever-changing connection to gravity when afloat. And then the movement quality transcends to that of the sea itself, until the dancer becomes a spirit of the sea. The final images of the work might represent the Sea Mither,
the mythical being of Orcadian folklore who lives in the sea and controls the surface of the waves.
The research includes: disorientating the body, sequential undulations through the body, spilling beyond our own skin and becoming one with the elemental. The experience of performing it is trance-like, with the aim of starting human and transcending to material, as if the body could
become water itself.
The effect of the work is disorientating, audience members described feeling sea-sick after watching, but also trance-like and elemental, emulating the experience of being at sea for a period of time.
Spindrift was choreographed and performed by dancer Jessie Roberts-Smith in collaboration with fellow NAIR 2024 sound artist Samm Anga. Samm layered sounds recordings taken onboard Excelsior, with song and rhythms built and distorted by the frequency of waves themselves.
Virginia Woolf, from The Waves
“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might
take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now… And in me too the wave rises”
John Keats - Sonnet on the Sea
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell.
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody---
Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!