Archives: Shows

More like a zombie than a pheonix, Desert Body Creep makes a case for transformation through a fantasy of decay. A pop song becomes an ear-worm and burrows through the pores of a body, opening black holes, plot holes and worm holes. Sinking slowly through a chthonic mush, it doesn’t care to be reborn, but it’s very happy to become undead. Things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl, and the next step is obviously to dance. Desert Body Creep is a life and death cycle with the epicness of Dune, but on the scale of a gummi worm, in the style of a surfie western, a cute horror, or maybe post-internet Lovecraft, set somewhere that’s halfway to nowhere on its way from everywhere. Recasting fear and monstrosity, Desert Body Creep assembles a new form of philosophy based on sweet and tender nihilism.

Choreographed and performed by Angela Goh. Sound operation by Matt Cornell.

Eke explores the tension between the performance and the documentation of the performance, by making them one in the same. As the live performance unfolds it is incrementally video recorded. As the documentation accumulates it is projected back into the live performance producing a recursive effect.

Body Of Work is a synthesis of the human body and technology, aiming to play with our perception of time, generating multiple and shifting points of focus for the audience, so they can create their own experience throughout the evening. The performance begs the following questions, What is the contemporary? What is new? What is now? What is present? The performance operates as an allegory of how to be ‘present’, to be in the ‘here and now.’

Choreographed by Atlanta Eke, performed by Atlanta Eke / Ivey Wawn. Music composed and performed by Daniel Jenatsch, video designed by RDYSTDY and operated by Martyn Coutts.

Punk in attitude, feminist in spirit and deliberately anti-spectacle, visions of beauty is a dance about itself and the compulsive, lopsided, angry, funny, frustrating and redemptive messiness of everything. Nine virtuosic performers demonstrate how bodies both trap and free us. The work examines relationships between art, power, agency and desire; language is distilled, stuttered, repeated, held and abandoned, leaving space for the audience to experience something beyond amusement. Precise choreography gives way to visceral improvisation in a conversation between the emotional and the abstract. visions of beauty undermines theatrical conventions, calling to question the object of the dance, the labor of the performers and the judgement of its audience.

Directed by Heather Kravas, visions of beauty is created in partnership with performers Andrew Champlin, Tarek Halaby, Michael Helland, John Hoobyar, Michael Ingle, Joey Kipp, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio. Original sound for the work is by Dana Wachs aka Vorhees,with additional music by Peter Schilling and lighting design by Madeline Best.