Dancehouse Announces 2018 Semi-Finalists’ Works for KCA
Semis 6-10 March | Finals 15-17 March
Melbourne-based Dancehouse, in partnership with The Keir Foundation and Sydney’s Carriageworks, have announced the program order that the eight artists who have been selected for the 2018 Keir Choreographic Award (KCA) will perform in at the Semi-Finals at Dancehouse next month.
Only four will continue on to the finals at Carriageworks.
The artists were selected by a high-profile international jury to take part in the biennial competition, dedicated to the commissioning, presentation, promotion and dissemination of new Australian choreography – Australia’s first major choreographic award, supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Learn more about the Artists here >> www.dancelife.com.au/2018-keir-artists-announced/
PROGRAM ONE
4 works x 20 min + interval
TUE, 6 MARCH – 7pm
THU, 8 MARCH – 7pm
SAT, 10 MARCH – 2pm
PRUE LANG
BHENJI RA
BRANCH NEBULA
NANA BILUŠ ABAFFY
~
PROGRAM TWO
4 works x 20 min + interval
WED, 7 MARCH – 7pm
FRI, 9 MARCH – 7pm
SAT, 10 MARCH – 7pm
+ Awards Ceremony
AMRITA HEPI
LILIAN STEINER
LUKE GEORGE
MELANIE LANE
The KCA Works
PRUE LANG – YONI
Concept/choreography: Prue Lang
Performers: Mikaela Carr, Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney, Tara Jade Samaya
Dramaturgical Assistant: Philipa Rothfield
This work is driven by Prue’s longstanding study of, and engagement with feminism – and her preoccupation with games as tools for structure and fluidity. Prue uses this framework to explore, question, counterpoint, discover and re-imagine the physicality of subjects – intellectually and metaphorically in time and space.
BHENJI RA – THE WETNESS
Concept/choreography: Bhenji Ra
Performers: Angel-Ho, Bhenji Ra
Sound Design: Angel-Ho
Costume Design: Matthew Stegh
She’s slippery, she’s fish, she’s hard to catch and she’s meant to be. She’ll slip through your fingers, no matter how big and wide they are, lost from your sight she’s saying, “you can’t have me”.
Queerness, transness, intersections of cultural identities die once comprehended. Fixed by a mass hetero global gaze, the essence of these identities is often at risk of erasure when subjected to a logic that seeks to finalise their form. Our bodies, embedded with the traces of history and cultural narrative, perform a queer act of rematerialising, remixing, resisting. Resisting who? Resisting you.
BRANCH NEBULA – STOP-GO
Concept/choreography: Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters (Branch Nebula)
Collaborating Artists: Phil Downing, John Bayliss
Stop-Go opens Branch Nebula’s choreographic toolkit for public inspection and use. Any performance is, in essence, just one thing after another and the order in which these things happen is infinitely malleable. Artists have some expertise in choosing the things and assembling the sequence, and audiences have a right to expect this expertise to be on display when attending the theatre. Stop-Go respects this implicit contract and provides the audience with everything they need to create a satisfying night, including: tension and resolution; high stakes; complex movement, and engaging personas(?). And while the human will be foregrounded throughout the performance, there will also be technologies never before seen on stage.
NANA BILUŠ ABAFFY – POST REALITY VISION
Concept/choreography: Nana Biluš Abaffy
Performers: Milo Love, Geoffrey Watson
I want to know what my body is looking for when it dances. I’m interested in the visionary body, and the body as a vision. Of all the plethora of images and artefacts that we have created and consumed – to place in front of all of this the body – it’s so bare, it’s confusing. The confrontation of the body vs all the un-reality we’ve built – it is a disruptive reminder that the body is still here.
Why is it that we need the body now, in this era of post truth? It is as though its appearance here now is some kind of proof. The presentation of the body as evidence that reality still exists. The body is a totality. A multiplicity in unity. We think the body knows how the future will unfold. And is able to communicate more precisely than language. We work from the premise that the body is an entire hypercomplex universe, and that its thoughts are capable of envisioning massive alterities. We are looking for a vision.
AMRITA HEPI – A CALTEX SPECTRUM
Concept/choreography: Amrita Hepi
Performers: Jahra Rager, Tyrone Robinson, Sarah Vai
Set Design: Alice Joel
Music: Daniel Von Jenatsch, Sarah Scott
Is it possible to transcend class through movement, or do society’s inscriptions remain firmly imprinted on the body?
Three performers conduct an embodied exploration of cultural corporeality, navigating a complex entanglement of the theatre’s social function, a motorbike and it’s ensuing somatic assumptions. They have you surrounded. Dualities intersect, as codes switch ‘n cruise the oily spectres of colonialism: the civil versus the savage, loneliness, joy, survival and the fantasia that surrounds colour and the body. Through sound, monologue, and all-consuming physical presence, performers blaze through dances of social mobility over time. A Caltex Spectrum unravels your material multiplicities.
LILIAN STEINER – MEMOIR FOR RIVERS AND THE DICTATOR
Concept/choreography: Lilian Steiner
Performers: Lilian Steiner, Reuben Lewis
Music: Reuben Lewis, Marco Cher-Gibard
Memoir for Rivers and The Dictator is a choreography for both the physical and the sonic body. It is about time and the body. It looks at the ways in which the human experience of time figures within the body, the ways in which the body accrues and absorbs events of various qualities, and with it, develops wisdom and value. Over time and across generations, the body becomes more and more of an archive, mapping multiple histories of presence and perseverance, which inevitably dissolve and reemerge. Devastation and celebration, control and submission, flood our experience and one learns that personal power is lost and found from within. Each of us is the Landscape, The Dictator, The Public. Each of us is The Pacifist and The Aggressor. We are Time and Timeless – an artefact in flux. There is no linearity or central figure in this story. We are all part of this narrative.
LUKE GEORGE – PUBLIC ACTION
Concept/choreography: Luke George
Collaborating Performers: Luke George, Latai Taumoepeau, Timothy Harvey, Brooke Powers, Leah Landau
Collaborator (Media & Technology): Nick Roux
A social choreography
A collective negotiation between bodies, objects, artist and audience
Using conflict resolution principles (an alternative and highly effective method used to bring disagreeing parties to a non-violent understanding) the group is set the physical task of moving a difficult object from one place to another. This is the starting point for a choreographic investigation into groups and group processes. From socially engaged artistic practice through to creating experimental performance pieces, the trajectory of Luke George’s work grapples with ways we experience presence and the present, in order to look for alternative ways of being that are to do with interactivity and intimacy in the context of performance. Through PUBLIC ACTION, Luke delves into the relational politics within spectatorship and audienceship, investigating how such politics intersect with embodiment and empathy.
MELANIE LANE – PERSONAL EFFIGIES
Concept/choreography: Melanie Lane
Performers: Melanie Lane, Chris Clark
Music: Chris Clark
Costume Design: Paula Levis
Personal Effigies is a synthesis of constructed bodies for a singular body, drawing from avatars, puppets, dolls and effigies. Lived experiential histories and fantasies of a future body come to form a series of imaginary archetypes that examine the boundaries of the animate and inanimate. Dressing and undressing the body speaks to how we seek out echoes, replicas and transformations of ourselves as we attempt to navigate the increasingly slippery ecologies that we inhabit. How do we design our shells, conjure our ghosts or distill our souls? In collaboration with musician Chris Clark and costume designer Paula Levis, a storytelling of romance and morbidity unfolds. The artificial and the natural, intimacy and its melancholic impossibility, are negotiated in this solo dance.
