Diana Baker Smith with Brooke Stamp
The One Hour Concert
2021
Single Channel 4K Video
9.30 minutes

The One Hour Concert is part of a series of works exploring the archive of the Australian artist, choreographer and dancer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75). Made in collaboration with choreographer Brooke Stamp, this video reanimates Cullen’s 1974 participatory work 24 Hour Concert, and gestures to a performance that was never realised in her lifetime.

Taking place at one of the key sites where 24 Hour Concert took place—once a gallery, now a boutique tailor— the camera observes as Stamp enacts a series of choreographed actions. Her intuitive movement vocabulary draws from various sources: the accounts of those who were there, performance documentation, scores and notes found in Cullen’s archive. While researching 24 Hour Concert, Baker Smith discovered that the event happened on the first day of daylight savings, which meant it fell short of its intended duration. And the plan to make up this lost time—by staging an hour-long concert the following year—never came to fruition.

Baker Smith’s The One Hour Concert takes Cullen’s work, and the stories swirling around it, as a place from which to begin. Through collaborative gestures, this video suggests that, while traces disappear, they may still be embodied and performed through strategies of intergenerational care, rewriting and reimagining. With a commitment to speculative reinvention—as a way to carry the past into the present—The One Hour Concert embraces and tests the generative capacities of Philippa Cullen’s archive.

Work Credits
Performance and Choreography: Brooke Stamp
Cinematography: Emma Paine
Video Editing: Diana Baker Smith
Sound Composition: Miles Brown
Sound Mix: Bob Scott
Colourist: Julien Chichignoud

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The One Hour Concert was first presented at Artspace as part of Tasks to be composed for the Occassion, curated by Bree RIchards. The project was supported the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body and UNSW Art & Design.