Cultures of Sound - February

In 2019 the surviving Tiller Girls, representing many different generations of dancers, met up for a reunion in Blackpool. Alison J Carr went along with Helena Öhman, to record the event and talk to the women. The footage of the event shows glamorous older women, posing, chatting, laughing, negotiating one another, reliving memories, and showing Carr how to pose as a Tiller Girl. The film situates the embodied experiences of performing, which can be read as the conditions of being a worker in Neoliberal late capitalism. For this event Rob Bentall was invited by the artist to develop and perform a live score for the film with nyckelharpa and electronics, highlighting more radical readings of the work in subtle ways.

In her work, Carr takes seriously the overlooked labour and lived realities of women who perform sexiness and glamour: showgirls. The artist also invokes the showgirl as an archetype, a complex web of traits and desires that maybe we all want to step into at times. Hyper-visibility and invisibility. What kind of freedom does visibility give? Or what prohibitions?

Alison J Carr is an artist and lecturer in contemporary art at the University of Huddersfield. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts, absorbing both the critical dialogue and the lure of the Hollywood facade. She returned to Sheffield completing a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University where she had gained her undergraduate degree. Her book, Viewing Pleasure and Being A Showgirl, How Do I Look? published by Routledge. She is currently co-editing, with Lynn Sally, a multi-author book, Sex on Stage. In 2018 she became a Platform / Freelands Art Programme recipient through Site Gallery Sheffield. In 2021 she was awarded ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant from ACE. She received a 1:1 Jerwood grant in order to make work with Lucy Haighton, a movement artist.

Rob Bentall is a composer-performer and sound designer. He often works with the Swedish nyckelharpa, his primary instrument. He has held artist residencies at international centres including CMMAS (Morelia, Mexico) and EMS (Stockholm, Sweden), and his work has been supported by national new music agency Sound and Music. He has composed soundtracks for companies including Knaïve Theatre, Northern Broadsides, Mafwa Theatre and Impermanence. His work explores hybrid relationships between ancient music and contemporary electronica. Rob was a finalist for the Franz Liszt Composition Prize in Weimar, Germany, and the Oxford/Sennheiser Electronic Music Prize. Rob is Associate Professor in Sound Design, Composition and Performance at Leeds Conservatoire, where he has taught since 2014.