Rowland Hill is an interdisciplinary artist whose work plays with and disrupts musical, gestural and choreographic regimes.
Rowland Hill (b. 1989, Leicester) is an artist based between Manchester and London, working across performance, moving image, text and sound. Drawing on a background in theatre and music, she often works with a host of collaborators including composers, conductors, dancers and interpreters.
She has presented her work at spaces and platforms including Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre; Fracto Film Encounter (Berlin); Aldeburgh Music; ICA (London); Splendor (Amsterdam); Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester); Flux Factory (NYC) and Printer Matter’s book fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (LA). In 2017 Rowland Hill received the Clare Winsten Memorial Award and in 2018 was shortlisted for the Adrian Carruthers Studio Award from the Slade School of Fine Art, where she recently completed her Masters degree. She is also the founder and co-director of Video Jam, an award winning platform described as ‘audiovisual masterminds’ (Time Out), dedicated to curating, commissioning and presenting moving image works with live sound.
Tha-at’s right
HD Video / 11:07 min / 2018
‘Tha-at’s right’ is a response to an idiosyncratic review of Stravinsky’s final ballet Agon, written by dance critic and poet Edwin Denby in 1959. Shot on 16mm, the film takes this review as a choreographic script for a new performance by interpreting Denby’s outlandish metaphorical descriptions of dance and music literally. This process of translation was realised collaboratively for camera with three dancers and a small ensemble.
‘…a seemingly disconnected parade of musical and choreographic gestures that swing – like Denby’s prose – between baroque grace and withering bathos. It’s funny – but more than that, it raises questions about translation, the fitness of words to sounds or movements, the role of criticism, and the authority of the score.’
— The Wire, December 2018