The dance of Lye

I myself eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement and only feel it. This is what dancers do, but instead I wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside of myself to see what I’d got. I came to realise that this feeling had to come out of myself; not out of streams, swaying grasses, soaring birds ... Len Lye.

Every film has its own rhythm, but how many of them engage with the essence of human movement, and of dance? New Zealand Artist Len Lye was interested in the composition of motion, just as musicians compose sound, from a young age. It was Lye, in fact, who coined the phrase ‘Visual music’.

The story goes that Lye as a young boy was watching clouds drift past and considering the way John Constable used to draw clouds to try to convey their motion. “Well, I thought, why clouds, why not just motion? All of a sudden it hit me – if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion.”

Applying principles of human kinetics to his many innovations in film and sculpture, Lye saw movement as ‘unpremeditated being; the uncritical expression of life’. Colours and forms embody rather than emulate movement, an idea he called ‘pure figures of motion’. We see this to mesmerising effect in the zig-zagging rhythms of Free Radicals (1958) set to the tribal drums of Africa’s Bagirmi Tribe. The creativity of indigenous art and dance, particularly that of the southwest Pacific, was a profound influence on Lye’s work.

A pioneer of ‘direct films’ (created without a camera), and ‘direct animation’ (hand-marking film), Lye favoured techniques such as airbrushing paint through stencils, batik, dyeing, scratching and etching. In A Colour Box (1935), a kaleidoscope of vibrant geometric shapes flutter and unfurl into lines that wiggle to the seductive rhythms of Cuban jazz.

A Rainbow Dance (1936) overlays shot footage with vivid colour effects. The narrative follows a playful itinerant (Rupert Doone), who moves through a hallucinatory landscape with the outlaw style of Fred Astaire. Pink fish jump over curling waves, a magenta silhouette of a gentleman plays tennis on a court that stretches out to the horizon like a desert highway, and multiple figures dance across a backdrop of laughing rainbows.

An Artist in Perpetual Motion continues at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until October 11 2009.