A/P D/V (2023)

A/P D/V is an auto-poetic machine gone rogue, a ground-breaking performance where the body, now out of range, must create signals to new rhythms and reorientate itself beyond capture, beyond landscape, and beyond dance. 

Time is running away. A figure strapped with shoes turned inside-out attempts to catch it. 

Horizons loom large, sirens wail and words begin to form. Balloon objects are assembled, then transform from animal parts to weapons to genitalia. The body is specialised and the dance is double-ended. 

Absorbing the arhythmic qualities of animals stuck in captivity, A/P D/V traverses a series of material and spatial dis-orientations. The body is sucked backwards into slippery moon-walk highways and jumping spirals, creating a floating feeling of weightlessness in the room.  Magnetically, the mouth is pulled around words of a hidden song, sung by a planted audience-choir.  An attempt to shoot Time produces a glitching physicality: fully embodied but technically, pieced together elsewhere.

Balloons are stuffed inside the performer’s costume so that her bodily pressure and movement create a live soundscape for the work that is responsive and experimental. A cross between an animal’s cry, a machine starting up and a tree snapping, these squeaking, creaking noises re-orientate the audience senses, both communicating and alienating sound as touch, and sound as embodiment.

With influences as vast as Sara Ahmed’s ‘Queer Phenomenology’, the 1998 short story ‘ The Cows’ by Lydia Davis; flatworms who were sent to outer-space by NASA in 2011 (due to a low electromagnetic field and biosphere, the worms grew an extra head on the other end of their body and once back on earth, the worms’ offspring continued to have double-heads, their DNA altered forever) and centrifugal liquid cultures such as whirlpools, A/P D/V blends the animal-human world, the virtual-more-than-human world and yet-unknown horizons to move with time, beyond it.  

Technical Specifications:

Staging Requirements:
- Black Matte floor (dance floor)
- Black box with no curtains hung
- Audience seating is on-stage - black chairs or benches with cushions/beanbags on the floor

Sound requirements:
Microphones and hardware:
- 1* Headset microphone, BodyPack, 4 switchable channels (821.725 MHz - 831.450 MHz) (can be provided by performer)
- 1* Mixing desk
- 4* Floor mics
- 1* Laptop Running Qlab 4

Lighting Requirements:
- Overall warm wash over space.
- Torch lights operated and brought by performer.