Goat Island films (DVD)
Photographs by John W. SissonGoat Island - A Last, A Quartet DVD 49 minutes; with booklet 32 pages, 2012 Between 2001 and 2009, Lucy developed a body of moving image work in collaboration with the Chicago-based experimental performance company Goat Island, of which she became an associate member between 2005 and 2009. Produced across the UK and the United States and shot on S16mm film, the four works — It's Aching Like Birds, Dark, Daynightly They Re-school You The Bears-Polka, and A Last, A Quartet — investigated the relationship between choreography, performance, memory, and cinematic form.
Developed alongside Goat Island’s final trilogy of live performance works — It's An Earthquake In My Heart, When Will The September Roses Bloom / Last Night Was Only A Comedy, and The Lastmaker — the films functioned not as documentation of live performance, but as parallel and autonomous choreographic works for the camera. Each project explored how movement, gesture, temporality, and collective performance practices might be translated, transformed, or reconstituted through cinematic processes.
The body of work explored the camera as an active choreographic collaborator capable of generating distinct spatial, temporal, and affective relations. Through editing, framing, duration, fragmentation, and the material qualities of analogue film, the works investigated how cinematic language could produce new forms of embodied perception and collective memory that differ from those generated within live performance contexts.
Situated within wider experimental performance and interdisciplinary art practices of the early 2000s, the films contributed to ongoing discourse surrounding liveness, mediation, ephemerality, and performance documentation. Rather than preserving performance as a stable archival object, the works proposed moving image as a generative and transformative site in which performance could be re-imagined, displaced, and extended.
Across the four films, recurring concerns emerge around:
choreographic structures for the camera
collective embodiment and ensemble practice
memory and disappearance
the relationship between live and mediated performance
duration and repetition
the materiality of analogue film
cinematic approaches to performance research
translation between artistic mediums
Following Goat Island’s final performance in 2009, the films were collected into a DVD publication accompanied by photographic documentation by John W. Sisson and critical essays by David Williams and Theron Schmidt. The publication has since been held in numerous international university library collections, positioning the body of work as a significant contribution to interdisciplinary performance and moving image research.
Collectively, these works contribute to discourses in performance studies, dance and choreography, experimental cinema, and artistic research by foregrounding moving image practice as a site for choreographic inquiry and by examining how performance can persist, mutate, and accrue meaning through cinematic form.