DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo), 2021

A Wall-to-wall film projection “DEAD TIME” (Maggie’s Solo)”, 2021: an editorial clock is counting time by the millisecond upward while a solo dancer performs exhausting choreography, swiping, hooking, and tackling, accompanied by a loud beep repeated every 42 seconds.

Following this temporally pressurised “tune,” the choreography opens with a high-pitched mix of contemporary gladiatorial activities: jabs, burpees, and rugby moves. Even running in circles while on the floor, Maggie’s movements suggest a painful and pointless circular acceleration, a self-inflicted, impossible pace. Maggie’s movements follow the repeated choreographic instructions of a voice (Spooner’s voice): “Jackal,” “Stop,” “Still Life.” She next arranges herself into a selfie pose, available to the camera.

The extreme close-ups of Maggie’s limbs, heavy breathing, and intense studies of her face are chased by the cinematographer carrying a wearable body camera. Falling in and out of focus, the images flicker between rehearsal documentation and rushes of a tightly composed “still life”, disturbed by the cinematographers sweating, wobbling body, or rugby moves caught in film shots of high commercial quality, captured at high speed. At other times, she appears to give this performance up; she waits, rests, spine rolls, even steps out of the frame entirely to drink, rattling her water bottle out of frame and out of sight.

The sound of Maggie moving and breathing captured on a radio mic, tangled up with a frantic radio wave frequency, makes it increasingly difficult to understand where Maggie’s moving body and the technology that records her begins and ends. This soundtrack is broadcast in a room that is separate from the film, and hence, this film soundtrack is encountered long before the large-scale screen becomes visible, dislocated from its source. The uncontainable sound of Maggie’s body thus spills over, traveling to the visitor before seeing an image.

Choreography: Maggie Segale and Cally Spooner

Performance: Maggie Segale

Scoring and timing: Cally Spooner

Single-take Steadicam recording: Charles Billot

Audio interference: New York City’s crowded electromagnetic spectrum

Postproduction audio mixing: Tom Sedgwick

Color grading, exporting: Charles Billot

43 minutes, 59 seconds

Commissioned by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Courtesy ZERO…, Milan

Artist Bio:

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Her live performances have been staged at, amongst others, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Performa 13, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum M, Leuven; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.

Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slimvolume/Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella, Collapsing in Parts, was published by Mousse in 2012.

Spooner is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Paul Hamlyn Award and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for practice-based art. She was born in the United Kingdom, is British Italian, and lives and works between London and Turin.

Maggie Segale (New Jersey, 1991) is an artist working between the fields of dance and visual arts, focusing on interfaces of the body and its material and immaterial forms. She has been working with artist Cally Spooner since 2016. She graduated with a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School, NYC (2014), and holds a post-graduate certificate from Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon, PT (2022). Maggie is currently an MFA candidate at University of Illinois, US (2026), studying Dance and Art History. More information and contact: Magdalynsegale.com <3