Current Projects
We Happen To Be Dancing
A new collaboration with Orley Quick. Working their way through a careful and indulgent selection of borrowed choreographies from YouTube, the duo (re)consider their relationships to dancing, composition, authenticity and one another.
Incognito
An intervention into the peculiar dynamics of ‘the dance scene’. I attend dance performances ‘incognito’, in wig, overcoat and sunglasses. This unconvincing disguise only increases my visibility; raising questions about the role of presence and participation in a small dance scene. Incognito persists as a strategy to protest of the banalities of professional obligations to attend, to speak, to be seen.
The title is the date
A collaboration with Channing Tatum. Each week of 2019, a new photo-collage will be available to download as a desktop background. Working with strict formal constraints, each week is an intervention in the last; a choreography of body, object and space within this digital frame.
More info soon.
During 2019 I will be developing a new choreography – of rage, luxury and bitterness –fueled by my experience of working as a nanny and personal assistant to families of significant wealth.
A duet between me and a king-sized inflatable mattress – my partner simultaneously a crash-pad, a stage, a refuge, a costume, a duet partner, a punching bag, and a minimalist sculptural object with a legacy in post-modern dance. Working with the gestures of grappling and strandedness, I seek to find personal, political and artistic agency in interrogating the entitlement of – and my complicity within – the 1%. As I test in practical and immediate ways how my body dances and impacts upon this (slowly deflating) surface, I will question the relationships between professional dance practice and those wealthy enough to be philanthropists and patrons; and the common labors of action, gesture, entertainment and care within these overlapping fields.
Things I’d like to make but can’t prioritize right now
Forty or so dances, some better than others
A solo practice and improvised performance exposing a bare process of dance and thought.
What Have I Got To Show For It? asked how I could maintain a professional choreographic practice: this project delves into my uncertain relationship to dancing. How, when and why might I continue to dance?
Set within a field of tangled microphone cable, I introduce to myself and my audience a series of dances. Observing my emerging movements, gestures and positions, both dancer and viewer sit with the question: ‘is this good dancing?’. The ensuing improvisations unfold from this attention, through processes of delving, refining, persisting, developing, transforming, struggling, testing, settling, or quitting.
Performance: Sam Pardes
Dramaturg: Paul Hughes
Initial R&D with the support of Sheffield Theatres.
Arrangements
Arrangements is a durational solo performance by Sam Pardes and Paul Hughes, in which a figure continually reorganizes a collection of found objects. With each repositioning, a new logic becomes apparent. The unpredictability and rebelliousness of these materials cause problems for the rule at hand, forcing the performer to resort to increasingly unlikely solutions.
Performer: Sam Pardes
Choreographer: Paul Hughes
Initial R&D with the support of Sheffield Theatres.
