frances d'ath dance for obsessive-compulsives


artists

dancers — emily kerr, jo lloyd, gypsy wood, gala moody, lou hartman
lighting — john dutton
sound — motorhead, slayer
costume — danielle harrison
set — hamish bartle
support — arts victoria, moriarty's project, dancehouse, besen family foundation, ausdance (vic), maximised by chunky move

background

extermination was developed at Chunky Move Studios under the Maximised Program, in late 2003, and was performed at Dancehouse in August, 2004. The 16mm film of extermination is currently in post-production.
extermination comes from my reading of Jean Baudrillard's book "Symbolic Exchange and Death", and deals with a the nature of performance, where the performance starts, and the history of being human, how the meaning of being human has changed, and how bodies are currently coded and decoded.
extermination attempts to degenerate ballet and performance into animality and cruelty, unfinished and loaded with the detritus of identity.

details

extermination is a meditation on Jean Baudrillard's book "Symbolic Exchange and Death"; on bodies that are models, robots, animals, corpses; on heavy metal, Motorhead and Slayer; on clothes, costumes, makeup, underwear, and shoes, and every kind of bad behaviour; On Goya and Disasters of War, the death of God, the end of civilisation; on bodies beyond morality, betray, seduce, kill, undress; The collective insanity of delinquent groups filled with indescribable euphoria, an out-of-control blindness.
The work is ordered around three main axes, which are derived from sections in the text: bodies, simulacra, and fashion; each of which has subsections, which interweave. The performers become both vehicles that illustrate these axes, and that instigate their defilement as anarchic and visceral signs of life. Like decay they are ephemeral and constantly overwritten and erased like a performance itself.
The entire work is the apparently unfinished product of an unending improvisation. We will be creating tiny worlds of different personae, characters, or individuals. They will exist in situations, tasks, events drawn from the book and other similarly intense or unnatural situations. The improvisations are long and unrelenting, and day by day construct a multiple reality that goes beyond our thinking.
The basic groups or situations are literal re-enactments of Baudrillard?s text, which then become overloaded with the conflicting desires and wants of the group?s individuals, each with their own agenda and reality. A dinner party where an android strives to keep its identity secret while malfunctioning, where a dog is treated as a fellow human, a kidnapper forces a hostage to perform meaningless repetitive tasks, a revolutionary plots a coup; the dinner party becomes a group of mountaineers approaching the summit, then a gang of street kids, a rock concert, prison, the end of the world. The individuals subsumed by the protocols of the group are worn down by successive incoherent tasks: copy someone, betray someone, seduce, kill, undress.
Over time, we become more certain of who we are in this new world, our fears, desires, things we keep hidden begin to emerge, we create a world full of more risk and possibility than the real world, and then take this out of the studio and into performance. What seems to be the act of delinquents is in fact the performance by people completely certain of what they are doing.

extermination was blogged on supernaut

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