AFTERPARTY - working title
Developing group dance piece.
This project is an early stages project and is seeking partner support and funding.
Afterparty is a dance theatre project with live DJing, set within the fictional context of a party that has ended (The DJ has left and so have the rest of the party goers), the remaining group of 4 women (aged 30/40) are frustrated by this ending. They refuse this ending, take over the DJ booth and ultimately create the party anew. Through experimental performance making, choreography, scripted dialogue and integrated music design (DJing) this project aims to look at single women’s relationship to partying (dancing and music) and draw attention to women’s challenge in acquiring space or feeling ‘at home’ in themselves and this society when outside of partnership, motherhood, family support or home ownership.
They inhabit a wider apocalyptic mood, surrounded by a sense that everything is ending (not just this party). This sense of ending is connected to their particular gendered experience of time pressure and internalised failure. Pushing past any notion of an ‘endpoint’ and inhabiting their ongoing life becomes a process of empowerment. For the women left at the party it is where they feel/or could feel most at home. Inspired by the style of a ‘3am conversation’, and exploring the question of why they don’t want to leave, will underpin the text. The women will DJ and become very successful at regenerating the party, they will make it weird but their own. The piece aims to highlight women’s presence within the urban night time, and women’s relationship to space, community, music and dancing. This project is directly inspired by the rise of female DJing within Bristol (and in other cities, Bristol is just the one I am witnessing first hand) and the history of music making and dance floor creation as a political act of defiance and community making.
Residencies:
July 2023 at Dartington Arts, Devon, UK (Images from this residency)
Dancers: Ania Varez, Linzy Na Nakron, Kit Hall.
