'Unstill Lives and Dancerscapes at The Museum of Club Culture'
by Oscar Romp
Preview Monday 9th July
Since the mid eighties Oscar Romp (Artist/dancer) has been employing his unique process at Jazz dance, Northern Soul, and other clubs, capturing the energy and vitality of the dancers. Drawing with pastel and charcoal on large sheets of paper taped to the dance-floor, Oscar fashions an image directly from what he sees (with no photographic intervention). The images are also informed by visual memory- (what he has seen and drawn in the past). Each drawing is an ‘on-the-spot’ improvisation, in which the key elements of the club event (The room, the lighting, the people and their movement) are played around with, moved about on the paper, erased and redrawn, as the evening progresses, until it starts to work as an image…Breaks from the drawing are taken to dance, and breaks from the dancing are taken to draw. Somehow the energy and insight brought by the one activity feeds into the other.
