Friday, April 6, 2012

Why Brasil?


The connection to Brasil started in 1992 when Dudendance were invited for a residency at the Imperial Palace in Rio. This led onto an invite from the International Festival of Theatre in Campinas to ran a large scale workshop at the university where Lume are based for the performance faculty of UNICAMP. Out of the workshop the company created a site-specific piece “Sphinx Hinter Gittern” which subsequently toured to festivals and was supported by the PT (workers party) to bring culture into shanty towns. The extended tour, which ran for two years, included a cast of four members of Dudendance and eighteen university students. 
The experience in Brasil was life-changing and has had a strong influence on the way Dudendance have worked in the rural town of Huntly over the past ten years. Subsequent visits to Brasil have included the production of two short dance films and workshops and residencies at the Centro Coreografico in Rio. Dudendance have established a network of dancers and performers with whom they collaborate on a regular basis.  






Thursday, April 5, 2012

LUME: Dance Theatre Workshop


The context of the workshop was to share the starting point for This Side of Paradise by exploring the theme of physical manipulation. Dudendance have created a movement technique where the body is "moved" and manipulated like a life size puppet. Inspired by the silent movies of Buster Keaton, who is moved by elements outside of himself (the wind, rocks, water, machine) what develops is a physical struggle - a movement created by invisible forces. The group for This Side of Paradise used this in developing their noir influenced characters that are metaphorically locked in a struggle with their own fate.  During the workshop ties are attached to the body allowing the person to be moulded into “simple” tasks such as sitting, standing, walking, getting dressed etc. This passive state is slowly replaced by an increased motivation to break away resulting in a playful fight between the performer and the manipulators. Once the ties are removed the performers repeat the whole process alone, recalling the “sense memory” of the task.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The Arches

 
'Every so often the Dudendance folk - Clea Wallis and Paul Rous - turn up at The Arches to give their followers a taste of what they get up to in their own base of Huntly.
This showing, not so much a work-in-progress as a selection of ideas that are bubbling under their work, picked up on themes that emerged during a recent summer project with local young people. Three of those Young Dudes – Deborah May, Cathi Sell and Gordon Black – are now immersed in a melting pot of text, movement and film sequences which play around with aspects of characterisation and behaviour.
The mood is film noir, but given the Dudendance penchant for skewing familiar icons and introducing some shape-shifting and an element of animalistic behaviour, the cinematic genre gets an intriguing upheaval. There’s a degree of physical distortion: torsos are grotesquely puffed up with cotton wadding that cuts across any glimmers of glamour in gun-toting gangster, moll or law-man. Movement, too, alters the imagery. Black and Sell, lip-synching as no-goodniks on the run (Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps) wriggle and squirm like snakes, albeit through clumps of white wadding. Rous, padded and hatted, like a Desperate Dan look-alike, is the tippy-toed predator-gumshoe who subsequently interrogates the wonderfully fragile, butterfly flittery creature (Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard?) portrayed by Deborah May. 

As a starting point, it could go anywhere. What shows already, however, is the value of what Dudendance achieves in Huntly through a bold and ambitious programme of workshops and site-specific community pieces.'  Mary Brennan, The Glasgow Herald, 21st of October. 

This Side of Paradise  The Arches, Glasgow

Monday, April 2, 2012

Stills



Into the Wild

Into the Wild was a public art project initiated by Dudendance in 2010, looking at what the woods means to local people, the place of 'wilderness' in the collective imagination and the importance of having 'unmanaged spaces'. 

For Gordon Black and Cathi Sells, this was their first taster of working with Dudendance.





Sunday, April 1, 2012

This Side of Paradise's work process

For the devising process we are using film-noir themes in a broad sense. The desperate and animalistic quality of the characters, their survival instinct and deluded nature, draws us into their underworld. By watching classic noir films such as Sunset Blvd. - including spin-offs by directors such as Scorsese and Cassavettes, we have acquired a feeling for the emotional journey encountered by a ‘typical’ noir character. 

In improvisation each performer creates their own series of scenarios linked to emotions, objects and situations that form a stream; a non-linear narrative. The emotions, based on the ‘noir motives’ of greed, paranoia, seduction, fear, doubt and revenge are played out using guns, cigarettes, money, telephones and drink. Padded cushions are beaten up and the contents used for stuffing, bloating the characters into hideous, cartoon-like versions of themselves.

We find ourselves repeatedly questioning ‘why noir?’, ‘why use these clichés?’

The clichés of noir surface time-after-time in different guises because they have a ring of truth. In our celebrity-obsessed world we are fascinated by fallen icons – lost souls with big dreams, whose fate ends in the gutter. The naïve aspirations of the American dream no longer seem relevant, and the anti-dream/ anti-hero still holds strong because most of us don’t make it onto X factor.