Continuing the Gutter Sprung residency with Watching You Dance [I Want To], a mixed bill of choreographed and improvised performances.
GUTTER SPRUNG presents five artists, who work with choreography, improvised movement, and live performance as mediums to share their current research. This is an event aiming to challenge where such mediums exist, how they are observed, and how they can be interacted with.
Theo Arran and Bea Bidault present The Shape of a Day
The performance takes the audience on a journey where the subtlety and details embedded bring human behavior closer to dance, as well as exploring the abstract movements and rhythms that bring the narrative together.
'Nobody can question that things fall again. A man gets sick and suddenly on a Wednesday relapses. A pencil on the table falls twice in a row. [...] Theoretically, nothing or no one would think of falling again, but the same is bound to, mainly because they fall back without conscience, falling again like never before.' Julio Cortázar
The duet explores how a couple takes care of one another, what losing the ability to relate with our surroundings means, and how animism relates to the concepts of purpose, identity, and being alive.
Lewis Walker will be presenting a short extract from their show Compete For Me
A work combining dance, gymnastics, sound, and queer culture. The work is a queer iteration of a gymnastics competition, based in a gymnastics arena, competing for patriarchal approval in the category of gender performativity. The work is an autobiographical retelling through a queer and skeptical lens.
Orla Collier
Orla Collier is a freelance dance artist based in the North of England. She works as a performer, choreographer, and teacher. During her improvisation, Orla will be sharing quotes, scrunching them up, "forgetting" about them, and then moving. As she responds to her impulses, those watching are invited to observe, make associations, and perhaps create their own story.
Tough Boys Collective
This work is a reaction to the burning hot summer of 2022. Within a climate of paralysing oversaturation, we are finding a physicality that depicts not what we’re feeling about the state of our world, but how we are feeling it together.
Bea Bidault presents Les Nuages/The Clouds: Extract 15'
The pandemic has enhanced a general sense of alienation and narcissism inherent in the neoliberal society, at the same time this has created a chance to reconsider how we want to belong to a community or create a sense of community. Through this work, I am specifically interested in exploring where the boundaries between the individual and the collective lie. To enhance these boundaries, I will collaborate with a designer to design and make inflatable transparent puffer jackets. I am interested in how the plastic will contain not only air but also haze (smoke machine) and helium as I want to see how that will change not only the physicality of the movement but how the relationship is affected by an invisible yet visible boundary. I aim to create work that is a reflection of how we can keep our singularities as individuals whilst still creating connections with others, as to shift the center of our purpose from the individual towards the well-being of a collective. The piece delves into how the politics of 'Transparency' affect the way we perform our identities, enhancing a behavior where the ‘truth’ is a performative act, and how concealing (the movement, the body) and privacy are necessary.
The work will use metaphors and fictional images, an alternative future if you like. To make visible things we cannot always capture in words.
