'Imagine an island separated from the world not by an ocean but by a vast desert. The tribe that survives here has almost forgotten what water was and every day they assemble to tell each other their stories and share their memories of water. Maybe if they remember well enough the water will come back? Aerial performance by disabled artists on the top of 4 metre high sway poles will evoke the movement of water and the ebb and flow of the tides, whilst a specially created musical soundscape, audio description and sign language interpretation will create an epic elemental environment to tell a moving story of loss and survival set in a near future that we can easily imagine.'
Against the Tide is a Greenwich and Docklands International Festival co-commission of Graeae and Strange Fruit. The production brought together the creative skills of a team of UK and Australian artists jointly led by Jenny Sealey (Graeae) and Sue Broadway (Strange Fruit) and was performed by a group of 'stormers' (friends from the Storm at the Lyric Hammersmith) among other actors from both companies, namely, Chisato Minamimura, Caroline Parker, Daryl Beeton, Daryl Jackson, David Ellington and Milton Lopes. The announced 'outdoor extravaganza on the banks of the Thames' didn't fall short, creating a small beach with four high flexible poles evoking multiple realities and making the audience look up in wonder. Multiple WOWS! paced the aerial performance that fused theatre, dance and circus, super-sizing the overall peformance with sublime moments in the sky of our own dreams.
[ images: Against The Tide, Graeae Theatre / Strange Fruit, performed at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival on 27 June 2009, photos by Emanuel de Sousa ]
Against the Tide is a Greenwich and Docklands International Festival co-commission of Graeae and Strange Fruit. The production brought together the creative skills of a team of UK and Australian artists jointly led by Jenny Sealey (Graeae) and Sue Broadway (Strange Fruit) and was performed by a group of 'stormers' (friends from the Storm at the Lyric Hammersmith) among other actors from both companies, namely, Chisato Minamimura, Caroline Parker, Daryl Beeton, Daryl Jackson, David Ellington and Milton Lopes. The announced 'outdoor extravaganza on the banks of the Thames' didn't fall short, creating a small beach with four high flexible poles evoking multiple realities and making the audience look up in wonder. Multiple WOWS! paced the aerial performance that fused theatre, dance and circus, super-sizing the overall peformance with sublime moments in the sky of our own dreams.
[ images: Against The Tide, Graeae Theatre / Strange Fruit, performed at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival on 27 June 2009, photos by Emanuel de Sousa ]
Labels: dance, graeae theatre, physical theatre, strange fruit, sway poles
At the still point of the turning world. Neither Flesh nor fleshness; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, There the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, / Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, / Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, The still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. [ T.S. Elliot, Four Quartets ]
The double bill of The Turning World 2009, at the place, announced a binding theme between two rather different works as the inspiration they both had found in the writing of Milan Kundera.
Italian coreographer/performer Simona Bertozzi presented Terrestre, an 'intense and powrdully-performed solo' freely inspired by Milan Kundera's Slowness. Informed by Kundera's dissection of the fragile naturae of and individual's fate, Terrestre is ' a dialogue between an incomplete human body and its becoming emotionally and experientially significant', tracing the body like a 'map of passing time starting from primordial nature, through an anthropomorphic state to reach the completed, already made human being'.
The precariness and instability of the human body fins here a synthesis that aims at the essence of things, the 'cleaniliness of form', through action, and through repetitive action, 'from the inner nature of memory', the body is pulled and pushed towards many changes of shape.
Dot504 presented Holdin' Fast, taking as their starting point Kundera's best-known novel The Unbearable lightness of Being. The work coreographed by Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea, combined contemporary physical dance with theatricla forms and original music, in a 'no-holds barred ballad about sexual dependency. Holdin' Fast immersed the audience (as announced) in sexual fantasy, as three couples search for the physical and psychic possibilities of the human body.
Through an array of situations and impossible positions, these three couples tried to fulfill their desire and changing will/mood/energy, to finally end stating clearly that we actually eat up the other, and with him/er, we ultimate eat ourselves.
[ video: Holdin' Fast, production dot 504 Lenka Ottova, choreography Rootlessroot (Linda Kapetanea and Jozef Frucek), performed by Helena Arenbergerová, Michaela ttová, Lenka Vágnerová, Pavel Masek, Petr Opavsky, Daniel Racek. Video editing done by christodoulos christodoulou ]
The double bill of The Turning World 2009, at the place, announced a binding theme between two rather different works as the inspiration they both had found in the writing of Milan Kundera.
Italian coreographer/performer Simona Bertozzi presented Terrestre, an 'intense and powrdully-performed solo' freely inspired by Milan Kundera's Slowness. Informed by Kundera's dissection of the fragile naturae of and individual's fate, Terrestre is ' a dialogue between an incomplete human body and its becoming emotionally and experientially significant', tracing the body like a 'map of passing time starting from primordial nature, through an anthropomorphic state to reach the completed, already made human being'.
The precariness and instability of the human body fins here a synthesis that aims at the essence of things, the 'cleaniliness of form', through action, and through repetitive action, 'from the inner nature of memory', the body is pulled and pushed towards many changes of shape.
Dot504 presented Holdin' Fast, taking as their starting point Kundera's best-known novel The Unbearable lightness of Being. The work coreographed by Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea, combined contemporary physical dance with theatricla forms and original music, in a 'no-holds barred ballad about sexual dependency. Holdin' Fast immersed the audience (as announced) in sexual fantasy, as three couples search for the physical and psychic possibilities of the human body.
Through an array of situations and impossible positions, these three couples tried to fulfill their desire and changing will/mood/energy, to finally end stating clearly that we actually eat up the other, and with him/er, we ultimate eat ourselves.
[ video: Holdin' Fast, production dot 504 Lenka Ottova, choreography Rootlessroot (Linda Kapetanea and Jozef Frucek), performed by Helena Arenbergerová, Michaela ttová, Lenka Vágnerová, Pavel Masek, Petr Opavsky, Daniel Racek. Video editing done by christodoulos christodoulou ]
Labels: dance, dot 504, physical theatre, simona bertozzi, the place
