The Fourth Notebook
2015 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
8:36 minutes
Sriwhana Spong
The Fourth Notebook features a solo choreography by dancer Benjamin Ord. In an empty dance studio, Ord begins seated on his knees on the floor. He moves subtly with gentle strokes to the rhythm of a woman’s voice speaking short phrases in French. His body rolls on the floor in short loop cuts and in sync with the repetition of words. Midway through, he holds various sitting, squatting and standing poses. The sounds of his feet sweeping gently against the floor and heavy breathing is exaggerated. The Fourth Notebook is inspired by the penultimate diary entry titled “To Mankind” by Polish ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinksy (1889-1950) written in 1919 during the time his mental health was deteriorating from schizophrenia. Nijinsky, whom Spong has been fascinated with from an early age, was famous for his performances as a faun, the spirit of a rose, a puppet, a blue god and other interpretations suggesting gender and identity fluidity. Although the text is comprised of comprehensible words, it has been described as grammatically and logically untranslatable. The phonetic rhythm instead serves as the tempo to a choreography created and performed by dancer Benjamin Ord. Spong’s sharp editing also serves as an accomplice to Ord’s gestures in which quick cuts and repetition accelerate to a synesthesiastic experience where the auditory, visual and spatial elements intermingle. Spong uses Nijinsky’s last words to create a new interpretation between language and the contemporary body. Exploring the slippages between sanity and madness, past and present, language and meaning has been a consistent thread in Spong’s oeuvre.
Indonesian-New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong’s practice invests in notions of transition, memory, translation, and the relationship between public and private space, the intuitive and the cerebral, and the body and its surroundings. With a dance background, Spong has a strong interest in choreography and meaningful dialogues and communications that different art forms can generate with each other. Her performances and videos recalls forgotten pieces and reimagines indecipherable sources by dancers she admires such as George Balanchine’s lost ballet The Song of the Nightingale and Vaslav Nijinksy’s “To Mankind” diary entry. By manipulating the sequence of gestures with the traditions and techniques of filmmaking, Spong investigates how the dance movements can register particular events in our collective memories. For Spong, the medium of film is an anthropological tool of inquiry to the search of history, its narrative, construction, transmission and alternation in time and space. Recently, Spong’s practice has shifted to language and focus on the female body, especially toward a group of women mystic writers and creators. Spong questions the ideologies motivating social norms, women’s roles and how inventing a new language is linked to freedom of speech.
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