Whats coming

Choreography: Alexandra Harrison
Dramaturgy, Design: Ben Anderson

What’s Coming was funded by Critical Path, Australia’s premier choreographic research institute and was co-produced through a residency at dance4 Nottingham and premiered at the Nottdance Dance Festival 2011, Nottingham UK. As collaborator my role focused on concept development and movement vocabularies and as dramaturge on the transference of ideas to the body, narratives of intention and spatial dynamics and organization. The performance addressed issues around technology, specifically an exploration of the digital, the analogue and the body ‘in a continuous risk of being outmoded’.

Technic (technical/industrial) had up until the 19th century been in-step with the human/societal progress. Technic has now developed ‘beyond the human’ by developing itself thus needing less human support. Exploring the philosophical issues of technic and automation through the body gave rise to the question what ‘comes’ to the body when these are stripped away? Establishing a choreographic language on the following themes: freedom of movement, automation and patterning, the habitual passenger, acceleration, analogue and obstacle, reference was made to Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion.

The performance included two original film works: one comprising a series of text cards referencing early 20th films, namely Charlie Chapin’s Modern Times, was entitled What’s coming is Coming Along. Including statements such as: ‘An immense accumulation of spectacles’, ‘A physical moving about’, ‘A triumph of activity’, it took the form of a poetic semi-narrative. The second film work was created as series of still-life portraits generated from road maps accompanied by Iggy Pop’s single “The passenger”. The dance floor space was demarcated into a series of tapes lines creating a landscape topography – its reference taken from industrial knitting machines.

Premier Nottdance Dance Festival 2011 Nottingham United Kingdom.