When Carolee Schneemann attended the 1964 Venice Biennale she expressed her experience about the city’s water and sky, light and shadow, solidity and transparency as follows: “This mirroring of water and sky introduced my visual concept of bodies moving within an antigravitational frame.” Inspired by these thoughts and images, Schneemann later initiated the performance Water Light / Water Needle which featured performers including dancers, painters, actors, and writers. The 1966 project Water Light / Water Needle (Lake Mahwah, NJ) was a filming of the performance re-presented at Lake Mahwah in New Jersey. Performers in this project would move freely, coming out of the lake, move along the ropes suspended between trees on the lakeside, and hanging on the ropes. They skillfully and rhythmically move within the ropes until encountering one another, where they then maintain physical contact, demonstrating the particular materiality of their individual bodies. Schneemann saw the ropes as “flesh extensions” and encouraged the participants to feel physical connectedness to one another. As with much of Schneemann’s work, the body is the surface on which a discussion between “body as subject” and “body as object” takes place.
