Johanna Billing I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm

Johanna Billing (b1973, lives and works in Stockholm) is showing the video work I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009). It deals with a live event in choreography, contemporary dance and live improvisation, which took place with amateur dancers and acting students during the ‹Periferic 8 Biennale of Contemporary Art› in Romania in October 2008, in association with the Swedish choreographer Anna Vnuk. Through several days Billing documented this public event and later edited the material to make a film loop through-composed with music and rhythm. The centre of attention is not the staging of a complete performance but the process of live improvisation between choreographer, dancers, local musicians and the audience. Billing works without any script. Her starting point is a certain idea about historical and social associations in a particular context and over a long period she observes the dynamics of the place and its local society. She then lets the involved persons improvise freely. She always puts a meaningful selection of music in relation to the existing context. In the edited film there is an atmosphere somewhere between a copy of reality and a fiction. Only there does the feeling of a silent choreography with invisible rules come into play. In Billing’s previous work this very approach to quasi-documentary observation of community projects, music and visual processing in the film’s post-production has been at the centre. The participation of the actors, improvisation and the open structure of the working process are the foundations of her work, and can be found again in various projects, such as here in a dance project or in the sailing trip of a music group (This is how we walk on the moon, 2007) or a children’s music school in Zagreb, where an English song is being rehearsed (Magical World, 2005). Billing’s painstakingly composed film technique aims a simplicity of form, oscillating between surface and depth. In this way she creates a powerful visual field of tension and emphasises the multi-layered interrelationships of the conceptual content. The presentation of the film in the exhibition space is also always spatially composed and has traits of installation. In this way she involves viewers actively and sensually in the experience of the work and challenges them to take up a point of view.