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Live Works: LinderThe Paradise Experiments: Video
The Paradise Experiments © Linder Sterling
The Paradise Experiments were held in March 2006, and were part of an exploratory preparation for Linder's recreation of her performance The Working Class Goes To Paradise (2000) which was staged at Tate Britain the following month. During the experiments, all of the musicians, and the women who had volunteered to dance, were given a sequence of instructions relating to gesture, tempo, pitch and temper. View QuickTime video of Linder: The Paradise Experiments Video documentation of the first of The Paradise Experiments is available below. The experiments on that evening were derived from nineteenth century photographs of a female Shaker at worship and written accounts of Shaker meetings from the same period. To play this video you must have the latest updates for QuickTime. Click on the link above to open the movie in a pop up window. Alternatively, to download the files to your own computer for playback, right click and save target as. Follow this link to download the QuickTime Player. Further information regarding the working process is detailed below under The Paradise Experiments: Text View flash video of Linder: The Paradise Experiments Move Slowly through the [Next Page] buttons on the flash popup, to see experimental movement sequences and review quotes from members of the Shaker movement. The file will open in a popup window and requires QuickTime and Flash to playback. Paradise Experiments: Audio
The Paradise Experiments © Linder Sterling
Various instructions were given to both the musicians and the women dancing. The recording below documents: three drummers play simultaneously for three minutes; followed by all three bands - 3d Tanx, Baby Judas and The Pylon Boys - playing for seven minutes. Download mp3 Audio of Linder: The Paradise Experiments
To download mp3 files, right click and save target as. The files are 128k mp3s and will playback in any mp3 compatible player. Follow this link to download the QuickTime Player Further Documentation
Paradise Experiments: Text
The Paradise Experiments © Linder Sterling
The Working Class Goes To Paradise was the performative strand of The Return of Linderland - a body of work that includes photography, film, print and artefact - some of which was exhibited at Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2000. The Return of Linderland was an epic vision of Manchester, in which the landscape, the people and the city's underlying history were brought together through the imagery of cowboy culture and, specifically, the director Sergio Leone's 'spaghetti' Westerns. Connections were made between north Manchester and a mythic lawless American West - a place where male violence existed as much for the sake of its own rituals, as for money or power. Interwoven is the biography of Ann Lee, an illiterate, working class Mancunian woman of the early eighteenth century who claimed to have had visions from God instructing her to found a new community of Believers. Whilst repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned in Manchester, Lee founded the Shaker movement and led their self-imposed exile to America. Claimed by some as the female embodiment of Christ, also as a prophet and Utopian socialist, there are no markers of Lee's life are to be found in Manchester. Within The Return of Linderland Ann Lee becomes The Woman with No Name. The Working Class Goes To Paradise was enacted as part of the Tate Triennial 2006 in its original form of four hours - half a working day and enough time to allow a sense of endurance - boredom, even - such as certain religious rituals may also invoke to allow the dissolution of the ego. Three rival rock bands - The Pylon Boys, 3d Tanx and Baby Judas, were invited to play simultaneously for that time. The guitarist Ian Devine, who had been instrumental to the original conception of The Working Class Goes To Paradise in 2000, also played lead guitar. Twelve women volunteered to recreate Shaker dance to the disparate soundtrack provided by the musicians. Within the enclosure of this performed structure, Linder assumed various identities: as a figure from one of her own early photomontages, parodying a glamour model; as Ann Lee; and as a super-heroic fusion of Lee and Clint Eastwood, becoming the' Woman with No Name.' The Paradise Experiments enabled further exploration of the themes of The Working Class Goes To Paradise. Two evenings were spent with the twelve women who had volunteered to dance, and two further sessions with the women and musicians together. Linder worked with the musician Sam Dale to devise a series of exercises which would test tempo, pitch, volume, consonance and dissonance within the piece, as well as experiments in movement and gesture with the dancers. | |
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