frances d'ath dance for obsessive-compulsives


artists

dancers — Long Yun Na, Xing Hua, Gao Jin, Li Jun, Xie Wei, & Dancers of Guangdong Modern Dance Company
Lighting — John Dutton
Sound — Scott Shaw
Costume — Bing Bing
Assistant — Sophia Rong Yi

background

carnivore was made for the Guangdong Modern Dance Company as part of their 10th Anniversary celebrations, and premiered on the 11th June, 2002 in the company theatre.
carnivore was made possible through an AsiaLink Performing Arts Residency which allowed me to work with the company for 12 weeks, and to teach at the Dungguan Acadamy of Performing Arts.
The Guangdong Modern Dance Company is based in Sha He Ding in the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in the southern provence of Guangdong, about 1 1/2 hours north of Hong Kong.

details

carnivore is a horror story where noone is innocent, and everyone is corrupt; where nothing is left unsullied by craven desire, and even death is no release.
carnivore is entirely devoid of homogeneity, a patchwork where each shred of space cannot locate its neighbour without a new convention, and the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined and can be effected in an infinite number of ways.
It is a complex structured, evolving improvisation of getting beyond oneself, and of becoming more like oneself. carnivore is a recursive algorithm, where procedures call themselves, modify the results, call themselves again and again in infinite loops. Inconsistencies and patterns emerge, and complexities flourish, and the dancers think as hard and as fast as they dance.
carnivore is entirely coded using Life Forms animation software. There is no attention paid to the way the shapes should look, and steps and their purpose become indefinable. There is a transformation of shape and a dissolution of boundaries, lines of flight form in favour of turbulences and flows so that nothing ends at a precise point.
In carnivore, there is a narrative that evades totally, like a vinyl record in which each track is like a layer and can be played back in any order, or like journeys where the journey itself becomes multiple and intertwining, the object of the journey lost or when attained, meaningless, and all points of reference to meaning slip away.

"I'm the world's forgotten boy
The one who searches and destroys
Somebodu gotta help me please
Somebody gotta save my soul"-

Iggy and the Stooges

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