MAPPING GENDER
Exhibition Guide
by Anders Duckworth, in collaboration with Kat Austen
(1) This exhibition has been curated by Work Place artist Anders Duckworth and collaborators. It showcases some of the research and rehearsal process of Ander’s work Mapping Gender which has been in development for the past two years.
“Maps carve borders through landscapes. Clothes are maps for the body. Both are arbitrary constructs, omnipresent in our society, and have a real impact on people.
Mapping Gender is a multisensory exhibition of dance, image, scent, sound and research. It’s an invitation to explore the parallels between cartography and historical clothing through a lens of non-binary experiences. Created by Anders Duckworth in collaboration with sound artist Kat Austen, Mapping Gender looks at landscapes, the way we draw borders and create boundaries on maps to carve up geographical space whilst also asking us to explore how we look at the body and how we use gender to carve and divide people.
Created in collaboration with nine interdisciplinary artists and a group of trans/non-binary volunteers, Mapping Gender includes selections from a series of recorded interviews with non-binary people discussing their personal experiences. By drawing together people who exist on the margins and the ‘in-between’ spaces we open up new possibilities and
provide an opportunity to re-discover the place and complexities we find in gender.”
Mapping Gender premiered at The Place on Wednesday 28 Sep, 2022. Photo Credit: Rosie Powell Freelance
(2) ABOUT ANDERS
Anders Duckworth (they/them) is a Swedish / British non-binary choreographer, performer and visual artist based in London. They graduated from London Contemporary Dance School in 2014 and, since then, has been making work that is cross-disciplinary and aims to blur the boundaries between dance and other art forms, often collaborating with artists and technicians from different fields ranging from designers and composers to analogue film specialists and computer coders.
Their most recent piece is Well Lit, a collaboration with Daniel Persson, exploring gender and cultural identity and their latest work, Mapping Gender, is concerned with gender and landscape. As a performer, Anders works with MaresavonStockert, Lea Anderson, Protein Dance and Requardt & Rosenberg among others. In 2019 Anders completed their MA at LCDS with a dissertation entitled Gendered Spaces: a perpetuation of inequality. Anders Duckworth is currently a Work Place Artist.
CREATIVE TEAM
Choreographer / Performer: Anders Duckworth Sound Artist: Kat Austen
Designer: Kit Hinchliffe
LX Designer: Martha Godfrey
Dramaturg: Emma Frankland
Costume Designer: Nadia Miah
Costume Makers: Nadia Miah & Laura Rose Moran-Morris
Scent Artist: John Foley
Technical Stage Manager: Stacey Nurse
Outside Eye: Ania Varez
Imagery: Rosie Powell & Guy J Sanders
Producers: Reece McMahon & Emily Beecher, The REcreate Agency
Thanks to Lawrie Smail and Antigone Exton-White for their continued support. With special thanks to the non-binary volunteers who contributed their thoughts and voices to this research process. Commissioned by The Place & DanceCity. Produced by The REcreate Agency. Supported by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts, Curious Arts, Ugly Duck & Cambridge Junction. R&D supported by The Place, Yorkshire Dance, DanceCity. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Anders Duckworth is a Work Place Artist.
PRODUCTION IMAGES
(on the left-hand wall as you enter)
Card 1
Imagery of Anders Duckworth in rehearsal for Mapping Gender
Photo Credit: Kit Hinchliffe
Card 2
Imagery of Anders Duckworth in rehearsal for Mapping Gender
Photo Credit: Kit Hinchliffe
Card 3
Imagery of Anders Duckworth in rehearsal for Mapping Gender
Photo Credit: Lawrie Smail
Card 4
Imagery of Anders Duckworth in rehearsal for Mapping Gender
Photo Credit: Dolly Brown
Card 5
Imagery of Anders Duckworth in rehearsal for Mapping Gender
Photo Credit: Dolly Brown
(3) SCENT IN PERFORMANCE
“Anders and I met first in 2020 to discuss what scent could bring to the concepts of the performance of the piece. Scent has rarely been used as an integral component in the performance of dance and we wanted to try to make it as embedded in Mapping Gender as costume, sound, lighting, set and movement.
We primarily use our sight and hearing when experiencing theatre. The addition of scent and the use of our sense of smell expands the experience for both the performer and the audience in the shared physical space of the theatre in a very natural way that requires no more than simply breathing and allowing our senses to do what they effortlessly do.
As a scent artist I thought a lot about the constant movement in dance performances and how movement occupies space. Introducing scents into that space that occur independently and overlap with each other seemed to me to be a very organic way to mirror dance movement. They move through the air in space together.
In Mapping Gender two distinct scents are used to reinforce the liminal themes of the piece. The scents are part of the mental spaces Mapping Gender creates temporarily and in our memory. Scent by its nature is temporary but we hope the memory of it being included in Mapping Gender remains as part of the shared time of the performance.”
– John Foley, Scent Artist
(4) Scent 1: Render
This scent represents the romanticised shoreline with mature trees in full summer leaf growing in earth. Render is earthy, woody and suggestive of green leaves.
The main starting source of inspiration for both of the scents used in Mapping Gender is ‘The Embarkation For Cythera’ by Jean – Antoine Watteau (1717). The setting of the painting is a shore line where land and sea meet in ever changing movement. This setting suggests themes of liminality, uncertain boundaries of natural and political spaces and time spent moving or about to move between two very different natural settings to an unseen destination.
‘The Embarkation For Cythera’ Jean – Antoine Watteau
1717
(5) Scent 2: Cythera
This scent is based on the smell of the sea. The sea has many different smells depending on proximity to shore, vegetation, marine animals and human activities. Cythera is a representation of a seashore which was used by sailing ships in the 18th Century. I used wood resins to suggest ships of the period, the dark wet smell of seaweed and a sharp top note for air above the sea.
At points in the performance these two scents are transmitted into the theatre separately and together as they would at a seashore depending on where a person is moving within that setting.
‘The Raft of Medusa’
Théodore Géricault 1819
(6) COMPOSING ACROSS BOUNDARIES FOR MAPPING GENDER
Listening is a large part of how I compose. My artistic practice stems from listening as a way to connect with others, be they human or non-human. Through the connection created by listening, the shape of the composition starts to become clear.
For Mapping Gender, my composition brings together multiple voices to explore the concepts of boundary-making, power and autonomy on bodies and landscapes. It comprises multiple voices and multiple instruments, traditional and novel.
My first step was to embed within landscapes of interest and to listen carefully to human perspectives that elaborate on these concepts from conversations Anders carried out with volunteers who identified as non-binary or trans.
The music weaves together human voices – excerpts from recorded conversations – with sounds from liminal landscapes. These latter sounds are found and recorded in landscapes where borders exist due to either geographical features, such as a shoreline where the land meets the sea, or where there are human-made borders. Some of these are sites of contestation, such as the division across the Korean Peninsula and the site of the wall that circumscribed what was at the time West Berlin. Others carve through regional and cultural identities,
such as the national borders between Germany and Poland, which bisect a region called Lusatia, the identity of which pre-exists contemporary national borders.
The Mapping Gender team gathered samples of soil and water from liminal and contested landscapes over the course of the research. Since 2017, I have been developing instruments and processes that allow me to “play” these samples live on stage using adapted scientific instruments that generate sound from the process of measuring chemical properties of the different soil and water samples. The stories of the landscapes’ physicality and potential imaginaries come together throughout the evolution of the performance.
The musical structure evolved in conversation with that of the choreography. Within this, the rhythms of the landscape and of speech work with Anders’s movements to inform the rhythms in the piece. To this have been added traditional instruments such as piano and trumpet and electronic music compositions fitting to the complexity and variety of the story and choreography of the piece.
Working with topics of identity is a responsibility and a privilege. To sensitively and respectfully work with the voices of others, and with/in regions of contestation, I aim to listen beyond myself, to hear what is being said rather than what I as myself think I should – or want – to hear. It’s necessary to understand without adapting what is heard to a
pre-existing framework. The process requires empathy and extreme openness, which itself is challenging and exposing. It is a breaking down of the boundary around my own self, which is reworked and remade during the realisation of a composition.
– Kat Austen, Sound Artist
Soil & Water Samples
(left to right)
Gibraltar soil
Korean water Republic of Korea / Democratic People’s Republic Korea
Ostsee water German / Danish border Sweden archipelago
Tyne water Newcastle / Gateshead border
Mauerweg soil and water Previous border between East / West Berlin
Dartmoor soil Wisman’s Wood Dartmoor soil Brent Hill
Lusatia / Lausitz soil Germany / Poland border Dartmoor Avon water
(7) MAPPING YOUR GENDER
The embroidered fabric and prints were created as part of a Trans & Non Binary community day of events hosted at Queer Britian, the first dedicated LGBTQ museum in the UK, just down the road in Granary Square.
Inspired by the phrase ‘Mapping Your Gender’, participants took part in workshops hosted by Anders Duckworth and River Manning to create their own responses.
(8) RESEARCH PROCESS: INTERVIEWS
Quotes taken from interviews held with anonymous trans / non – binary participants in the early stages of research. Participants have given consent for their words to be used as a part of the work, with some voices featuring in the performance.
(TV) THREE SHORT FILMS BY ANDERS DUCKWORTH
1) Unravel
Video Credit: Rosie Powell Freelance Sound Credit: Kat Austen
2) Spilling Time
Video Credit: Rosie Powell Freelance Sound Credit: Kat Austen
3) Pages of Maplines
A film showing a book created by Anders in 2014 Video Credit: Anders Duckworth
