Maresa von Stockert
Find out more about Belonging(s) on Maresa's website here.
Belonging(s)
BELONGING(S), Tilted Productions
in association with Crying Out Loud
June 2017, 101 Outdoor Arts Creation Space, Greenham Business Park
Tilted Productions’ poignant and beautiful promenade piece meandered through in- and outdoor spaces, encouraging the audience to see the familiar in new ways, with local spaces turned into illusionary worlds.
Created by Maresa von Stockert in collaboration with an inter-generational cast of eight performers, the work combined contemporary dance and physical theatre, and the integral use of objects and locality. The audience were led between pop up performance vignettes and installations at three main locations.
The performance began inside a space reminiscent of a imaginary factory. Performers moved inside cardboard boxes and danced with old records, in a set piece with finely choreographed switching, sliding and rolling of old records on makeshift constructions formed from cardboard boxes. At times, dancers concealed in cardboard boxes held records out as the visible parts of the choreography.
A beautiful duet between an older female dancer and a performer acting as a child took place as they dismantled a wall of cardboard boxes, creating echoes of the longing of a parent when a child is growing up and separating from them.
In the final set piece, a woman danced with a piece of cardboard stuck to her foot, and a man moved with shiny record sleeves as wings. Throughout the piece, the cardboard boxes were gradually torn up and the dance became more disintegrated, with a sense of dislocation and a frustration.
A character gathered as many pieces of torn cardboard as he could. There was a notion of people making something out of nothing, echoes of homelessness, of clinging to the meanings of belongings.
The piece toured and was recreated for each location, in responsiveness to the sites, and in some places the local community took part in the piece.
Belonging(s)
At 101, Tilted Productions ran an R & D workshop for professional dancers exploring choreography around objects. One task involved a dance improvisation while concealed in a cardboard box. The dancers also worked with records and different ways of playing and moving with the records, balancing them on fingers, flattening them and passing them to one another.
The creation of BELONGING(s) has been supported by:Atelier 231, CNAR, Sotteville-les-Rouen, FR; La Breche, PNAC, Cherbourg, FR; Le Citron Jaune, CNAR, Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, FR; Le Fourneau, CNAR, Brest, FR; Unit 101 – Outdoor Arts Creation Space, Newbury; Dance4, Nottingham; DanceEast, Ipswich; LCDS, London.Tilted Productions is funded by Arts Council England and Ipswich Borough Council.