Inherent Awkwardness

Come for the dance, stay for the awkward silences.

Two danced solos, one video installation. Stories and bodies, tea and knitting, a wolf, a warrior, and explorations of femaleness in all the forms your mother never told you about.

Created and presented by explicit body performance artist Virginia Kennard, object and dance artist Jess Quaid, and installation artist Maggie Covell, this triple-bill is explicit, exquisitely watchable and performed close enough to touch. (Please don’t touch)

Dissordered Deficit of Active Attention offers real-time compositions of confused ramblings and movement phrases that attempt to sell the image of a body as an individual product, whilst hyperfocusing on knitting, drinking cups of tea, and telling stories about desire for contact but not sex, intimacy but not connection, and hopes for sexualised failure.

Red: the forest dweller’s solo takes the story of Red Riding Hood and weaves spoken text and movement into an exploration of character and desire. More folk-lore than Disney, encompassing wolf, child, woman, warrior and more, this solo plays dance against voice, and both against the audience’s expectations. Happy endings, or not, we are all astray in the woods.

Responding to the between spaces, Maggie Covell’s installation work examines the relationship between social spaces and femaleness through a post-feminist lens. Covell’s work also offers a response to both performance solos through the notion of readdressing or “redressing” the space as a form of connectivity. Projection mapping and time-based installation graphics will contribute to an immersive encounter, which looks at taking the private public through visual perspectives.

Welcome to this artistic and spatial negotiation. Welcome to a space of clumsy beauty and vibrant uncertainty. There'll be time for a chat after, in the meantime: enjoy the awkward silences.