Marvellous Mechanical Museum

30 June – 30 September 2018

A video of the dance piece ‘The Machinery’ appears in this summer exhibition of automata, exploring the boundaries between the living and the animate. ‘The Machinery’ is an astonishing early 19th-century clog dance, devised by women working in cotton mills. As they danced, the women closely mimicked the sounds and actions of the mill machines around them.  This is a new interpretation of the dance, one I co-devised with Caroline Radcliffe in 2007. It incorporates a soundpiece composed from the sounds of Quarry Bank, a working cotton mill  on the Cheshire-Lancashire border.

The video in this exhibition was made by Jon Harrison. It shows our performance of ‘The Machinery’ for Algomech 2016, Sheffield Millennium Centre.