Endangered Species (2006), was made in collaboration with choreographer Siobhan Davies, fashion designer Jonathan Saunders, filmmaker Deborah May, and visual artist Sam Collins. Installed at the Natural History Museum as part of the Cape Farewell Project, Endangered Species presents Sarah as a holographic video contained within a specimen case, pierced through with rods in a costume designed by Jonathan Saunders, and explores through movement some of the issues of climate change.
Endangered Species
Davies drew on a distinctive passage from one of her dance company’s recent major works, Plants & Ghosts, in which dancer Sarah Warsop had started from a single simple movement, replicating it through a choreographic process evoking cellular growth. In Endangered Species, the development from movement to phrase to dance passage quite quickly brought in the need for simple props, light flexible rods with which the diminutive figure extends her ability to reach out in all directions. With its ever-increasing adornment and subsequent restrictions on expression, the dance points to how increased consumption alongside so-called technological ‘advancement’ is fast becoming more of a hindrance, rather than a help, to the development of our species. The figure put on show in a glass vitrine, re-emphasises the fragility of the dancing form and the need to preserve it. It is presented here as a specimen, a rarity; a branch of the genus Homo sapiens that has either died out or is yet to evolve.
Endangered Species was first shown in the large-scale Cape Farewell exhibition, The Ship: The Art of Climate Change at the Natural History Museum. Shown in the museum's Jerwood Gallery, The Ship offered a unique insight into the experiences of artists who had travelled to the High Arctic with Cape Farewell.
The work has also been shown at the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool Cathedral, The Place and most recently at the Oxford Playhouse.
