Private Dancer takes place in and around a specially designed and purpose built ‘house’, a realistically scaled luminous installation, containing 5 different rooms.
A room is a private space in a person’s life. Collective access is normally denied. Each room is filled with personal memorabilia and objects, belonging to a solo disabled dancer, who inhabits and performs there to an audience of one. This intimate performance arena opens a portal to a normally unseen, unknown perspective of a person.
At the leading edge of disabled dance practice and a pioneering show under any measure this is possibly the most significant show at The Fringe this year” The Skinny *****
BACKGROUND
Private Dancer follows the thread of the disabled dancer as the main protagonist in their own work. The experience is one of artistic control that develops and liberates what each person has to offer as creator and inventor.
The work has grown out of an on-going line of enquiry that aims to support the contribution of the disabled voice to the art form – new vocabularies, performance presence, devising processes, re-examination of aesthetic criteria and the development of new collaborative practices and partnerships between disabled and non-disabled artists, choreographer and performer.
It began with the following questions: How can the learning disabled dancer find their authentic voice in performance without interference from the other? What are the collaborating forces that would enable that to happen? How would audiences be affected?
DEVISING
Private Dancer has a particular devising process that aims to liberate the ‘authentic voice’ of the disabled performer, on their terms, capturing the movement qualities that are present when people are improvising in a fully engaged and embodied way.
Each performer has a distinctive approach that is given time, space, circumstance and relationship to allow it to develop and flourish. The overall aim is not to change people but to make them more of themselves.
Disabled and able-bodied performers work in collaboration and partnership to devise and create the various strands of the work. It is a duet of sorts where each person brings their own particular set of skills, strengths, experiences, personalities and contexts to the mix. The constellation of these differences working together, brings something new and often unexpected.
AUDIENCE
The audience are visitors and guests invited into a new public/private performance arena where individual audience members are selected (or not!) by the performers themselves to enter their room and watch, alone, in private, the solo dance. Being this close, in this direct encounter and in this relationship with a disabled person, is a rare power balance and a rare opportunity. The concept and structure of the work plays on our instinctive, inquisitive natures, especially when confronted with difference.
Private Dancer ’is an art-led work. The end product aims to push limited and limiting expectations and challenge socially constructed boundaries. It is political because the power balance shifts, as the audience are invited to cross a threshold literally, metaphorically and emotionally and enter the domain of the dancer.
At its heart is a welcoming, wondrous and intriguing experience.
