INHERENT AWKWARDNESS
17/03/2022 - 27/03/2022
Production Details
Created and presented by Virginia Kennard, Jess Quaid Maggie Covell
Come for the dance, stay for the awkward silences.
Two danced solos, one video installation. Stories and bodies, tea and knitting, a wolf, a warrior, and explorations of femaleness in all the forms your mother never told you about.
Created and presented by explicit body performance artist Virginia Kennard, object and dance artist Jess Quaid, and installation artist Maggie Covell, this triple-bill is explicit, exquisitely watchable and performed close enough to touch. (Please don’t touch)
Dissordered Deficit of Active Attention offers real-time compositions of confused ramblings and movement phrases that attempt to sell the image of a body as an individual product, whilst hyperfocusing on knitting, drinking cups of tea, and telling stories about desire for contact but not sex, intimacy but not connection, and hopes for sexualised failure.
Red: the forest dweller’s solo takes the story of Red Riding Hood and weaves spoken text and movement into an exploration of character and desire. More folk-lore than Disney, encompassing wolf, child, woman, warrior and more, this solo plays dance against voice, and both against the audience’s expectations. Happy endings, or not, we are all astray in the woods.
Responding to the between spaces, Maggie Covell’s installation work examines the relationship between social spaces and femaleness through a post-feminist lens. Covell’s work also offers a response to both performance solos through the notion of readdressing or “redressing” the space as a form of connectivity. Projection mapping and time-based installation graphics will contribute to an immersive encounter, which looks at taking the private public through visual perspectives.
Welcome to this artistic and spatial negotiation. Welcome to a space of clumsy beauty and vibrant uncertainty. There’ll be time for a chat after, in the meantime: enjoy the awkward silences.
Dunedin Fringe Online Venue
17 – 27 March 2022
Koha
ONLINE SHOW LINK
Partial nudity, Sexual themes, Swearing, Marxist reading of sex work.
Performance Art , Digital presentation , Dance ,
1 hr
Various approaches to virtual performance
Review by Hannah Molloy 20th Mar 2022
This trio of performance pieces, translated to a virtual audience experience, were a mixed bag in this media.
Red – Forest Dweller, choreographed and performed by Jess Quaid absolutely worked as a digital audience experience. The film work (Matt Gillanders) was coherent and detailed enough for it to stand up virtually – I felt that perhaps it was actually more suited to a virtual experience than an in-person one.
Jess Quaid’s choreography is uncomplicated but combined with her spoken word and the backdrop of bush and birdsong overlaid with a discordant soundscape that somehow morphed into the sound of wind (sound design and composition by Adrian Holley), it made for an unsettling and menacing show. I’m still having the visual of “just another shadow”. *shudders
I was a little bemused by All the Girls Love Alice, a video installation by Maggie Covell. It provided an aural respite from the discordance of Red, and before the dissonance of Dissordered Deficit of Attention. My screen may have been too small to get the full effect of this work – I couldn’t read most of the words and wasn’t sure if that was a necessary element. The digital art pieces themselves were visually busy but fun to watch.
Dissordered Deficit of Attention was designed and performed by Virginia Kennard, about 25 minutes of Kennard sitting in a bath knitting and vocalising the stream of consciousness that happens in our brains when we’re doing busy work with our hands. Her voice was overlaid by a metronome and a range of other soundscapes, which shifted, reflecting the tone of her thoughts and perhaps her brain patterns – creative and hectic. I felt this work didn’t translate so well to a virtual audience experience, but I was intrigued by the idea of it live, perhaps in an empty shop window, creating a transient and partial experience for passers-by.
The layers of challenge for our artists to get work up and audiences in front of it are many and varied, and full credit to them for persevering under such relentlessly trying times.
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