Diana Baker Smith
The One Hour Concert (Hobart)
2022
Live Performance
60 minutes
Performers: Sofie Burgoyne and Wendy Morrow
Musician: Jon Smeathers
The One Hour Concert (Hobart) is part of a series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75).
While researching Cullen’s 24 Hour Concert, 1974, Baker Smith learned this participatory performance took place on the day when clocks are put forward for daylight savings—meaning it ran for only 23 hours. A second, hour-long concert was planned for the following year to make up for the lost time, but Cullen died before this could happen.
This story, and Cullen’s work, were the starting point for Baker Smith’s improvisational performance, The One Hour Concert (Hobart), made in collaboration with dancers Wendy Morrow, Sofie Burgoyne and musician Jon Smeathers. Across its sixty-minute duration, the dancers embodied and reimagined gestures drawn from 24 Hour Concert, encountered through documentation, performance instructions, and other archival traces. With The One Hour Concert (Hobart), Baker Smith grapples with Cullen’s elusiveness, while gesturing toward alternative methods: for valuing her practice and rewriting art history.
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Installation view, The One Hour Concert (Hobart), Diana Baker Smith with Sofie Burgoyne Wendy Morrow and Jon Smeathers, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart 2022. Photo: Rèmi Chauvin.