Soft Encounters, Boiled Dreams
music & dance
Premiere: Georgia Van Gils, Celina Hage, Luther Wilson, and Lilly King
Music: Stephen de Filippo & Kane Tenadii-Hay
Choreography: Georgia Van Gils, Celina Hage & Nikki Tarling
Lighting: Némo Gandossini-Poirier
15’00"
Curated by Geordie Crawley and Serena Chalker, eight artists – four choreographers and four composers – collaborated to produce four new dance and sound works to be presented at the Alex Hotel, Northbridge.
Artists were tasked to create site-responsive pieces, focussing on a presentation outside of traditional performance venues. Considering the public nature of the hotel, the audience experiences the piece through silent disco headphones. This creates the challenge of how can an audience still feel connected to the space and the dancers when the sonic qualities are blocked out from the headphones?
As a response, Kane and I attempted to aestheticise the sounds of the hotel – the grinding of the coffee machine, the tapping of china cups, the chairs scraping on the ground – how could these elements be harnessed to accompany dance?
The musical result culminated in 6 vignettes that draw from the worlds of field recordings, music concrete, and EDM production: 1) Entering the space; 2) cups & coffee machine; 3) coffee table & pads; 4) chair scrapes; 5) scrapes, metal plate & vase; 6) moving outside.
This work was created out of a intensive two-week collaborative period where we continually engaged with each other and the Alex Hotel space. The project was supported by Tura New Music, STRUT Dance, LINK Dance Company, Edith Cowan University, The West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and The West Australian Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
Program Notes
Step into a world of slippery phenomena. In this shared illusive reality, space dictates and encounters emerge. Here, we witness the tangible become transient.
Review
Moving across the mezzanine to the Alex’s “living room” space, we’re confronted by three denim-clad creatures (Celina Hage, Georgia van Gils and Luther Wilson), their heads obscured by hoods of gauze that render them almost indistinguishable from one another.
This is Soft Encounters, Boiled Dreams, in which choreographic trio Hage, van Gils and Nikki Tarling, and composers Stephen de Filippo and Kane Tenadii Hay transport us into a parallel world. It’s occupied by these strange beings who slither discomfortingly close to us at times, accompanied by a score that rhythmically samples the hotel’s own sounds (think the chinking of teaspoons, the rattle of the coffee machine), at once familiar and ominous.
Nina Levy, Seesaw Magazine
Performances:
26/07/2021-28/07/2021: Alex Hotel, Northbridge, Western Australia, Australia
Photos:
Sound Sources:
