SWINGER 1995 – 1996

Enter the turbulent mind and emotions of the lover. ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ by the French writer Roland Barthes, is dissected and animated through a fusion of dance, text and visual design. A huge pendulum hangs in the center of a distorted room, the furniture slanting at the angle of the pendulum’s swing. This setting provides the playground for the writer’s analysis of his own obsessions, desires, fantasies, loves and losses.

Passionate dances between strangers accompany fragments of the writer’s thoughts. The players swing too and fro between transitory states of being, from ecstasy to melancholy, lust to repulsion, from and embrace to solitude. The pendulum swings dangerously though their world of instability and chance, governing their fate. The lovers dive, lurch, fall, tumble and turn to escape the massive blow of its weighted base.

The swing of emotions from ecstasy to despair drives the weight of the mind’s pendulum. Love, obsession, infatuation, jealousy, lust, longing, loss – the lover analyses the distortions of his own mind in relation to “the Other” in Roland Bathes’ “A Lovers Discourse”, the inspiration and central text for Swinger”

SWINGER was funded by the Arts Council of England, and commissioned by the Nottdance Festival, Nottingham, where it premiered. Swinger toured throughout the UK in 1995; including a feature in London’s spring Loaded Festival. In 1996 the piece was adapted for film, in collaboration with director Ross MacGibbon, commissioned by the BBC and the Arts Council of England and broadcast on BBC television and TV companies overseas.

PRESS:

“It’s a sophisticated, unpredictable and magical world and Snaith has lived up to her tag as the choreographic equivalent of Lewis Caroll and his looking glass vision”
The Big Issue

“A piece which achieves the near impossible in adding new and vivid images to the already crowded dance vocabulary of love”
Judith Mackrell, The Guardian