I travelled from Stockholm to Helsinki on February 5 across the Baltic sea by ship to the Skiing on Skin 2026 dance festival. This year is much colder than last year, and the sea ice is more extensive. This mass flow of ice on sea, makes me think of movement and dance. Here’s photographs and the beginning of ideas for dance.
Nature of the ice
The ice floats on the sea although it is also water like the salty water beneath. It is fragmented and while it floats, it also folds under the plates of ice next to it; or moves beside it; or it is upended and held. There are lots of possibilities, and the size of the fragments is not uniform; nor their shape; not their thickness; and neither the distribution or density of the sea ice.
But there is surface to the ice sheet, and it is below the air which is also fluid and moving above.
Of course, the water, the sea is also fluid and it has fluidity in its movement as the waves in it, act on the ice. Pushing, pulling, submerging and orienting it, in many ways. But there is pattern – in some sense. How often the ice is broken; its distance from the shore; there are many interplays in it all.
Movement
When I made these photographs, I used an orthochromatic film with a rated film speed of ISO 80. The film is sensitive to blue and green but not red – which I guess, is very appropriate to the seascape of ice. But for whatever reason, it gave the result for which I hoped.
The ship on which I am standing when I made these photos is moving and so there is a blur, and a sense of motion in the images. While it is me who moves, the sea ice also moves and flows. So there is this communication of movement too. This is especially true as the camera shutter speed is 1/8th of a second. The ‘slow’ shutter speed is needed for their to be sufficient light that an image is created on the film and its chemical coating but it does not ‘freeze’ the image!
Dancing in Trios
My reason for crossing the Baltic sea is to attend the Skiing on Skin contact improvisation festival near Helsinki, Finland.
There were classes about dancing in more than duets – trios and quartets, etc. However, what impressed me most was dancing a trio in one of the jams (dance sessions). It was partly the feeling and sensation of it, and partly the visual spectacle of it.
Surface
The trio dance was very floor centred and it very much had a flow of the bodies over and around each other. Almost like an organism – perhaps a bacteria, or maybe a fragment of sea ice, travelling across the floor surface. Because, the sea ice is moving on the surface of the sea.
But also at this festival then I meet a dancing microbiologist who researches bacteria, and my thoughts are there too – with this paradigm of micro-organisms and as he said to me: a world of feeling.
So this has made me think of a score or choreograph for the above. At the same time, I also reflect on the residuals series which I produced, and the movement of charcoal on a paper surface which was part of the residuals research practice. What links these all, is this idea of mass flow. A flow of ice; a flow of bodies; of micro-organisms and a flow of charcoal. It is all movement on a surface of some sort. You can see surfaces from the Residuals #1 here.
Charcoal and ice!
Just for fun, I have inverted the colours in these photos from the residuals series, so that in these photographs of charcoal drawings then black becomes white, and white becomes black. Inverted! The black charcoal is like now like ice and the white paper below it, is black like the dark sea below the surface of the ice.
Charcoal as ice
The above is a photograph of the paper with charcoal on it from the Residuals #1 performance. When the colours are inverted then the black of the charcoal becomes white – like sea ice!
Ice as charcoal
The above is a photograph of sea ice taken on my journey across the frozen Baltic sea on February 5. (Actually it was an over night journey leaving Stockholm on Thursday 5 February and arriving in Helsinki on Friday 6 February.) I have then inverted the colours so the white sea ice becomes black charcoal!