Eddie Ladd, Cof y Corff / Muscle Memory

Review in Issue 19-2 | Summer 2007

This is an interesting one. You are: watching Eddie Ladd dance/move on a wooden stage with a freestanding MDF room at the back; listening to narration through a set of headphones; listening to music coming from speakers; watching live footage on one of a bank of computer screens, this footage mixing live capture of Eddie with recorded material, overlaying much of it with various SFX. Maybe you are also scratching an itch or wanting to go to the toilet. It's a lot to deal with. But for me it really worked. I heard some audience dissent on my way out, but the combination of so many different media and the division of attention – which normally turns me off – gave me a pleasant sensation of being caught and carried everywhere by unexpected currents. The way it worked is that you would arrive at an emotion and have really no idea what caused it – I got a bit teary during one section, where I was watching live footage of Eddie put through kaleidoscope-like refractions and multiplications, two Eddies running on each other's feet. It might have been the music (by Dewi Evans) that made me cry, or it might have been some grand structure of tension and release. Who knows? Muscle Memory is subtitled 'an essay on foot' and there is an interesting if slightly fragmented essay in the narration, but the piece as a whole is a long way from the logical progression of thought and formal structures of essaying. It helps that Eddie Ladd seems so comfortable and open. When at the start she comes out and says hello, you feel she really means it. It's almost shocking.

Presenting Artists
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Feb 2007

This article in the magazine

Issue 19-2
p. 29