Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Leeds Beckett University
'T.Hanks’ B-Motion
This practice-led research uses dance and theatre to investigate the relationship between live performance (dance-theatre) and mediated work (film), by playing with ideas of filmic representation being regarded as ‘the truth’. The performance involves theatre maker Oliver Bray and dancer-choreographer Rachel Krische deliberately upsetting and responding to the expert practices of one another. Concentrating on the relationship between the voice and body within the context of ‘expertise’, formally this work focuses on the ‘performance attributes’ of the two performers, overtly challenging preconceptions of dance and theatre practices.
Principal research question: How can a performer/dancer/collaboration investigate concerns of the ‘expert’ in performance practice and media/celebrity culture?
Re-appropriating texts from the films of Tom Hanks along with celebrity award acceptance speeches, this performance repositions the idea that a film might successfully represent the past, while simultaneously drawing the attention of the audience to the inherent performance qualities of the perfomers in the live moment. Through strategies of pastiche, layering and collision, forms of dance and theatre are pitted against each other in order to problematise the ‘worthiness’ of arts practices, using the politics of the personal to cast doubt on global political representation.
This research resulted in three performances at the B-Motion Operaestate Festival 2011, Italy, Yorkshire Dance 2013, Leeds and GIFT 2013 (Gateshead International Festival of Theatre).
