ANOIKIS
BlakPlastikBag
Premiered in Bologna 2011 Sinfonie per Appartamenti
Action is transitory...a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle...this way or that...
It is done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like a body betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark.
And shares the nature of infinity.
2015 Fact Liverpool
Dancer/Choreograhper: Melissa Pasut
Composer/Performer: Andrew Leslie Hooker
Dancing in the plastic dark upon digital slithers of fractured cells…kitchen-sink (anti) melodrama in all it's holy schlock…the denial of spectacle within the poetics of space…screaming "miniature" as the refuge of greatness…dream theatre in absurdum and the politics of sublimity… …the ugliness of spirit in the face of extinction Vs amplified gestures in the quest for truth…for freedom…red shoes and the public image…ltd…classicism and situationism merged into an infinity of conflicting signs…subversion as prime-time fodder for the huddled masses…the fear and desire of nothingness…a gob of greasy grime in the art-snobs eye…timefolded reveries between states of being and non-being…the beauty of emptiness in the face of a gloriously bruised incomprehensible…in the life-affirming gaze of creatures unforgiven by an A-star cast list of over-paid Gods…radical chic in reverse…all the way to the chopping block…a song of love and death on the critical horizons of "good taste…hinterlands of social and racial ambiguity in the piggy consumption of the high/low divide…a brotherhood of mortality negating the static philosophy of movement…muscle bone and blood upon a concrete shore…continuous everyday acts of transforming a cold and uncaring universe into the adrenalin rush of the now the now the now…a supreme struggle for mental and communal balance within the grotesque dramaturge of post-human brutality…an ascendance of the lived-life over the dog-days of fanatical boredom…body-bag-blues and stale conundrums… wizened escapologists blinded into delirium by golden-age illusions of haloed enlightenment whilst the lizard king grins and whispers…"no one here gets out alive".
A.L.H 2015
Workshop that is presented in conjunction with BlakPlastikBag
Aspects of Melodrama in Movement and Sound
This workshop is an inquiry into aspects of melodrama as related to movement and sound. Eschewing the post-modern contempt for direct confrontation, the two artists explore the various ways in which melodrama can bring audience and performer uncomfortably close to the viscera of the romantic experience. Identified as avenues of self-reflection, the participants will be divided into two groups of dancers and musicians* and led into a critical and practise-based survey of the range of emotions that artistic abandonment inspires, models of dance and music that utilize expressionist impulses to “speak the unspeakable” and the various ways in which melodrama itself can be viewed as nothing less than a moral power evoking Rouseau's and Sade's dreams of uncensored speech. Both groups will explore a full range of “gestural excess for greatest effect” techniques in both disciplines and conclude with an informal performance open to the public.
