Author(s): Steve Carr

Performing Arts Drama Plays

Leveraging the long history of hands in art and film – from the fetishistic symbolism of Surrealists Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, to the nonchalant minimalism of choreographer and experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – prominent New Zealand artist Steve Carr's Variations for Troubled Hands lifts its title from an imagined technical manual for ballerinas. Featuring more than 200 photographs of Cadence – a teenage ballet prodigy apprenticed to the Royal New Zealand Ballet – Carr's debut book presents a serial composition in 12 parts, choreographed and performed by fingers, forearms, tendons, palms, wrists and thumbs. At once an interactive object and a performance space, Variations for Troubled Hands manifests the dynamics of movement, and invites us to dance with it.