This Is An Emergency Service is a dance film that explores the artists’ creation and re-enactment of queer urban grief rituals. Emma’s installation is made up of wall hangings and two films; the larger of which is her main project of 2022 and documents the dance in multiple sites across Glasgow city after nightfall. All costume materials are found or donated up-cycled hi-vis workwear, transformed into grief scores.
Emma uses choreography derived from traditional English folk dances and this influence is apparent in the modern-day straw-bear-like costume with tassels that bounce and surround the dancer. Her other repertoire draws from research into movement sequences designed to calm the symptoms of grief, such as panic attacks, by developing new neuro-pathway connections and also from the very physical pain of grief itself; of which the impact on the body is vast.
I have made a work that speaks to a collective urgency to grieve whilst exploring my own coping mechanisms for dealing with grief in a film that documents an urban re-enactment of queer mourning ritual. The format is intentionally easily sharable and I am happy to send you the film to view at home: This Is An Emergency Service is 15:19 minutes in length.
Special thanks to Olivier Julien and Odile Postic for their support.
The film was made as part of my final major project at Glasgow School of Art during my masters in Fine Art: Performance, for which I received a distinction. The showcase for the project can be found here.
“It not only revolves around the personal but the work goes beyond this, expanding into otherness and current ‘emergencies’.”
“The installation has a great visceral and energetic directness to it — in use of moving image, mark-making via sewing, night-time field recordings and in the glowing sculptural ‘flotsam’ materiality.”