GUNCOTTON
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Collaboration with New Dialect, César Leal, and Jessica Usherwood

https://www.newdialect.org/guncotton

Working from the book Atlas of Novel Tectonics by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s adage “architecture is nothing but frozen music, music is nothing but liquid architecture,” Greg Pond and Banning Bouldin adapt the text's concepts rooted in the deconstruction and recomposition of architectural principles to develop a new “language” for generating cross-disciplinary works of dance, video, sound, and sculpture. This is an ongoing project where recursive responses between what is produced by the dancers, sculptures, sounds, and images continue to inform the subsequent steps of the collaboration. Architectural conjecture becomes dance that becomes sculpture, sound, video, and images. The resultant images become sound, dance, then sculpture again and so forth. Through this process Pond and Bouldin create a new sort of discursive language that evolves as their collaborative research deepens. Colombian conductor and musician Cesar Léal and vocalist Jessica Usherwood have contributed to the sound installations for this work. 

Applying improvisational dance techniques to concepts of architecture, Pond and Bouldin explore how rule games develop sculpture through motion. Dancers identify and project anatomical and geometric limits according to rules we generate. Each time a dancer finds such a limit, the collaborative begins the process of incrementally unfolding their movements to find the parent shape or form that is recorded and interpolated to become an object, sound, or image to create continuously unfolding sets of dances or objects by investigating intensive properties of matter and the physical abilities of the body, each seeking a new sort of geometry to become. In other words, Bouldin and Pond starting adapting parametric algorithms and principles intended for new architectural design to create dance, sculpture, images, and sound. There was an intentional and inevitable impossibility in the attempt to conform – or migrate – the inherent modes of each medium – the material, conceptual, or bodily constraint of one to the others. This collection of images and text reflect this process, forming a diagram to navigate inconstancy –  a metaphysics of process to find new possibilities in our collaborative practice. Flux is the only constant. Each image is one step within a series of prompts that create the diagram. 

The initial dance research investigates the impact of intensive and extensive properties of matter, coherence, and incoherence on the human body through improvisational tasks. These tasks are both sensation based, illustrating qualitative states such as density, sharpness, softness, translucence, etc, and form driven, exploring changes in scale, fragmentation, collapsing points in the body, unfolding to extrude lines and curves, etc. Bouldin applies these modalities to individuals and groups of dancers. Pond then 3D scans the dancers to generate sculptures, drawings, and sound that illustrate both the dancers’ physical histories and the impact of the prompts on the multiple disciplines of our project using computer code Pond and computer programmers Marianne Sanders and Charles Stehno write to reinterpret the dancers.

In his introductory essay to the Atlas of Novel Tectonics, The Judo of Cold Combustion, Sanford Kwinter describes the process of the finding “the unfolding geometry that previously was either held in exquisite or frozen suspense or was subject to the instantaneous and uncontrolled unfolding that we know as explosion”.  By finding this middle ground “… a rhythm of unfolding that delivers the geometries of matter to the senses in the form of properties, qualities, or affects in real time, endows the world with novelty…it is best not to bury novelty too deeply in the murky mysticism of “invention” but to raise it affirmatively as a product of a spontaneous - or deliberate –…. migration of what current philosophical parlance calls the diagram… an invisible matrix, a set of instructions, that underlies… and organizes- the expression of features in any construct.”

Guncotton exhibitions:
Zeitgeist Gallery, 2018
Art Prize, 2018
Stove Works, 2018 – Melt My Heart by Spare my Soul (land and Sea Series)
Art Index Interview with Audrey Mulloy, Allisonb O’Daniel, César Leal, and Greg Pond  of Melt My heart But Spare my Soul at Stoveworks, featuring Guncotton  

Banning Bouldin is a graduate of The Juilliard School. She is the founder and artistic director of New Dialect, a contemporary dance collective based in Nashville. 

César Leal is a Colombian born conductor and musicologist. He is currently the artistic director and conductor of the Sewanee Symphony Orchestra in Sewanee, TN, where he also serves as faculty member of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival. He has led ensembles across the U.S., Panama, Colombia, France, and the Ukraine; has recorded works by several Latin American composers; and has presented scholarly papers in the U.S., Canada, Greece, Japan, Italy, France, England, Peru, Colombia, and Switzerland.

Jessica Usherwood is an active performer and soloist. She earned a doctorate in voice performance and literature from the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University; a professional diploma in opera and master’s degree in voice performance and vocal pedagogy from the Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University; and a bachelor’s degree from Lee University. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN.