This Bright Field
Concept, direction and design: Theo Clinkard
Artistic Collaboration: Leah Marojević
Realisation and performance:
Leah Marojević, Stephanie McMann, Meri Pajunpää, Natalie Corne, Crystal Zillwood, Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Luke Divall, Mathieu Geffre, Nick Coutsier, Colas Lucot, Pau Aran Gimeno, Samir Kennedy (Antonin Rioche -original cast)
Sound composition and performance: James Keane
Vocals: Archie Keane
Lighting design: Guy Hoare
Costumes: Rike Zöllner
Clinkard and his company of twelve exceptional dancers, have crafted a dance event in two distinct parts that imaginatively reorientates the audience to consider the subjective and objective gaze and experiences of togetherness.
In Part one, the audience are invited in small groups to share the stage with the performers as they deftly collapse and expand a maze of screens to direct and edit the audiences’ experience of their dancing. Within the miniature worlds created, time slows as captivating and unrepeatable exchanges between the performers elicit an atmosphere of intimacy and care.
In Part two, Clinkard’s choreography takes to the full stage on a cinematic scale. Back in the auditorium seats and with the familiarity of individual dancers still in mind, the audience witness the twelve-strong cast navigate a series of social and choreographic conditions. Degrees of agency within the group setting are explored as visceral terrains of movement, sound and imagery gradually build in momentum until
This Bright Field, powered by connectedness, becomes a highly visual and emotional experience.
'This Bright Field, Clinkard’s most recent work, is full of visual pleasures and surprises, but his overriding preoccupation is with the transmission of feeling.' **** THE OBSERVER
'This Bright Field glows with the extraordinariness of life on earth.' ***** THE ARGUS
'Clinkard has in effect unified his own choreographic field to develop a theatre of the senses from the inside out'
WRITINGABOUTDANCE.COM
'The changes in scale and sound keep destabilising and reconfiguring our relationship with what is happening onstage: we know them/we don't know them, they're like us/they're not like us, they're pedestrian/they're virtuosic, there's a story/it's abstract – but these responses feel reductive, binary, when its clear the work isn't showing us something, but sharing something.'
DRAFF.NET
Photo: Stephen Wright
World Premiere Brighton Festival 2017
Thursday 25th May at Brighton Dome Concert Hall
This Bright Field was a Dance4 co-production. Co-commissioned by Brighton Festival, Dance4, The Greenwich Dance & Trinity Laban Partnership, The Lowry and Tramway, with additional support from The Point, The Miskin Theatre and the National Lottery through Arts Council England.