Tony Thatcher and Mariana Lucia Marquez have curated a creative grouping of professional performance installation works that include pieces from emerging professionals and recently graduated students of Trinity Laban. They would like to acknowledge the support of Trinity Laban and OAC.
The event as a whole proposes seeing performance and choreography as part of a wider interdisciplinary cultural space, where choreography in particular attempts to avoid the standard contexts in which dance is presumed to be seen and performed.

Performances

Unfashion :: site-specific dance
choreographers: Marquez&Zangs
performers: Diina Bukareva, Alenka Herman,
Mariana Lucía Marquez, Emma Zangs

Deleuze and Guattari once described a type of machine that works by breaking down. This, in turn, reminds us of a story told by Jérôme Bel. A dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet has a difficult landing after a double pirouette en l’air and receives a much louder and emphatic applause at the end of his solo than all other soloists. Failure on stage, rather than undermining the performance, adds something to it: a surplus, an artistic value.
In Unfashion, three dancers and a choreographer stage a fashion-show-like performance that continually undoes its own idioms. We ask what it means to be live on stage: choreographing in real-time and redrawing of the lines of the ‘catwalk’, we trick ourselves to in the “here and now” and hope to fail.

Aukelien/Two minus one :: dance and live music
choreography: Martina Francone, Hrafnhildur Einarsdottir
(OAC Collective)
with support from Tony Thatcher
sound: composition by Simone Tecla
performers: Martina Francone, Hrafnhildur Einarsdottir
musician: Davide Woods
costumes: Francesca Zambernardi and Aurora Damanti
lighting design: Vincent Field

Aukelien/Two minus one explores the boundaries between restriction and freedom of movement, within space and time, throughout a movement score. The starting point is the artists’ interest in the body language of the Dutch saxophonist Aukelien Kleinpenning, while playing Le Frêne égaré
by Francois Rossé. Inspired by her performance, the choreographers created a movement score, focusing on the use of breath, arm gestures, repetitions and upper body motion. The experience of time is a key feature of the piece, diversely perceived from the audience and the performers.

ReBodied :: dance and live music
choreographer: Diina Bukareva
dancer: Antti Kankainen
musician: Markus Tapio

The work presents an improvisational approach to investigate both movement and sound through memories of sensory experiences. Returning to their visual notes (drawings) Markus Tapio and Markus Tapio have re-embodied their original studio experiences. In this process original memories are shared and re-lived in a new time and space.

Broken Symmetric 2 :: dance
choreographer: Pia Fodinger (OAC Collective)
composer: John Adams
performance: Pia Fodinger, Martina Francone,
Hrafnhildur Einarsdottir costumes: Francesca
Zambernardi and Aurora Damanti
lighting design: Vincent Field

This piece is an exploration of upper body motion, investigating the emotional theme of the words “fighting through” with courage to be your-self. One important key-element in this work is – beingin the moment! The performer’s aim is to let the physical effect of the motion take them on a
personal performance journey in which immediate coping with in a set framework of a score allows the performer to deal with known, conscious as well as unconscious elements with in their moment of performance. Situations in our lives when certain restrictions can create inner courage and
strengths, which suddenly turns these restricted situations into a tool for more personal freedom.

Score (-stance) :: dance and live music
choreographer: Tony Thatcher
composer: Kim Helweg*
performers: Ina Dokmo
viola players: Nic Pendlebury

The five sections of Score fall naturally into time frames of between 1’26” for section one to 3’36” for section five. The score of the five complete sections lasts for around 14’ 30” minutes. The section durations act as significant framing devices for the work as a whole and mark the bar line for the beginning and end of a section. These are also recognised as a change of movement tone and colour both for the performer and the alert spectator, to distinguish one section from another.
Towards the end of the score these bar lines become somewhat hidden, recognised usually by the dancer only. Throughout the work there is no metric beat. There is no measure of linear time other than by means of a stopwatch which marks the duration for each movement / choreographic section.