Exploring overload

In essence this research and development phase is all about jumping inside someone’s head, what impact does that feeing of overload have, when everything just becomes too much, when you feel you can’t breathe, when what you really need to do is stop, but the pressures of life mean you can’t, or don’t and you just try and keep going.

Where is the space?

Life feels so fast now, our lives are consumed by an overload of information, a stream of notifications, social media, news, current affairs, advertising, emails, ever changing technology, we are constantly on catch up, and it doesn’t stop. 

For me this is the external impacting the internal, and then that ripple effect on our physical and mental health. This is something I believe affects us all at some point, and perhaps the root of overload is different for different people, but the feeling and impact I expect, is pretty similar, and we all share this world that doesn’t stop, doesn’t sleep, where you can contact anyone at any time, anywhere, where we have the world in our pocket, but how do we manage it in a positive way?

We are more and more connected on a global scale but somehow it feels like we are more disconnected with ourselves, other people and the physical world around us.

Bringing together a composer, three performers and a creative team who specialise in immersive technology and cutting-edge visuals and projection, the research and development period will allow us to begin exploring ideas for an immersive dance/theatre piece, to develop creative content, and explore how immersive technologies can enhance the artistic vision and concept whilst maintaining the creative integrity of the work.

Much of my work has led me to theatre and movement directing, it challenges me to think in a different way about movement, and I’m always discovering and exploring new approaches, each actor and project is different and so you are constantly having to find new ways of working. Coming from a dance background I love the rawness you can find working with actors, it brings something different to a process. I am fascinated about the possibilities of bringing dancers and actors together, mixing up the genres, so part of this process is about how do we do this, how can we make it work, can we make it work, which is really exciting.

We’ve had an amazing first few days on the project, beginning with movement, devising and creating.

Here are a few pics of day 1 with dance artists Angharad Harrop and Elan Elidyr, it has been an absolute pleasure working with these two! We began looking at the idea of disconnection.