frances d'ath dance for obsessive-compulsives


artists

dancers — Ding Yi Zhong Congbin
Lighting & Costumes — Frances d'Ath
Sound — Agoraphobic Nosebleed
Assistant — Shanshan
Residence — Park19 Artists Studio


background

bitches took place in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China as part of an artist residence at the newly created Park19 Artists Studios on June 4th, 2005.
The residency and performance/installation was also assisted by dancers from the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, Yunna Art Studio, and collaboration with several artists with whom I have been friends with during the past three years of making dance in the city.
The work is formed primarily from my current obsessions with Francesco Goya and the etchings "Los Capricos", and the theatre of death metal and satanism.
bitches was supported by the Australia-China Council.

details

pretty girls with too much money, rapists with murder on their minds, prostitutes, lepers, hanged men, witches, demons, corpses.
capricious little bitches.
bitches is not a work of dance. it is the absence of dance.
highly choreographed shop window-dressing.
beautiful dancers being beautiful.
fashion sex and death.
30 second satanic death metal demonic invocation

bitches is specifically not a dance work. conceptually the staring point was the following suppositions:
Making dance requires alot of time, alot of money, and dancers. Normally making dance has no time, no money, and dancers who come and go. Most dance works are not works of art but the final product of endless compromises caused by these three things. By removing making actual dance from the rehearsal period, there is more time to make a dance work, more can be done with no time. In this respect, bitches is an practical response to the idiocy of trying to make dance.
Dance is often incomprehensible and boring. Even to dancers. Most dance is not art, and mostly dance is not regarded as art. Art happens in galleries. Dance happens somewhere else. bitches is probably more like art than dance, like performance art or an installation. So obviously being in a gallery is a good place for it. bitches is also absolutely a work of dance, in fact it is a ballet. so please look at it as a ballet - ballet in the wrong place because ballet should always be in a theatre, and also look at it as not dance, and probably not even art.
Usually, dance has too little going on for too long. I used to think that rocknroll was the perfect length for dance, around 4 minutes. Then I discovered Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and realised 20 seconds is even better. I think though I've probably done too much in bitches, and would have been better off stopping earlier.
On one side i'm really interested in the 'zero degree' of performance (like Roland Barthes' 'zero degree' of writing): what's the least you can do and still have something that can with genuine certainty be called a performance, ballet, or dance work. Against that, I truly love the opulence and ceremony of the Baroque, when too much was never enough. Somewhere else is an on-going obsession with the grotesque, corporeal desecration, and general stuff to do with having a body, and an equal obsession with making insanely fast and complex dance. All of these things pull in different directions, and undermine each other, an endless string of ... and ... and ... and ...
Pretty much I'm just here to entertain myself. I'm trying to see how much I can get away with, how long I can keep myself amused. I suspect though, that bitches is pretty tame, and most likely I have no idea.
Please feel free to feel confused, and enjoy the fact that it will be over very soon.

bitches was blogged on supernaut

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