SCARED SHIRTLESS 1986-1987
Scared Shirtless was inspired by events and characters from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred years Of Solitude. Images, related to love tragedies, obsessed, bereft and solitary women, morph from one into the next through the transformations of a giant shirt, and the solo performer’s changing relationship to it. The costume serves as both clothing and setting.
The yellow butterflies in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “100 Years Of Solitude” would not leave me alone, so I exorcised them in this piece.
Scared Shirtless was funded by the Arts Council of England and Commissioned by the Institute Of Contemporary Art, London. The work toured in the UK, often as a double bill with Blue Whiteness Rhapsody.
PRESS:
“It is a visually stunning opening to a solo show that is at its best in creating images of striking clarity, force and unexpected beauty – images that linger in the mind ….it is not that she reflects specific situations in the book, more a mood, an emotional landscape of magical intensity, full of surprising transformations. At its best, the piece resembles the novel, too, in its scope, its strangeness, its intensely vivid and personal individuality”
John Clifford, The Scotsman
“It’s a wise and witty piece, full of inventive ideas as well as Snaith’s sturdy, athletic movement. She has a splendid awareness of how juxtaposition of various elements – music, dance and design – can offer subtle comments on social situations. Her dance is, even when expansive whirling, quite contained and precise especially the finicky little hand movements that punctuate the work with a bolshy femininity.”
Mary Brennan, The Glasgow Herald
“As a dancer, Yolande Snaith moves, fast, hard and dangerously, a solid blaze of energy governed by iron control….Snaith has a brilliant visual sense – her ideas are funny, incongruous and moving and she executes them with a fierce attention to detail.”
Judith Mackrell, The Independent
“Brimful with inventive movement, a ready wit and a sharp eye for the imbalance of male/female relationships – being wrapped up in love (or in this case a Goliathesque Shirt)- can be as smothering as it is comforting.”
Keith Watson, Hampstead & Highgate Express