Presented by Salamanca Arts Centre and Mobile States.
Who are we, what are we without the gift of speech? How does speech become language? And how does language function as a tool of both power and oppression? All these questions emerge out of Tess de Quincey‘s Nerve 9. This is an extraordinary performance… a powerful work built on serious intellectual content. …awakening those feelings of shared but unacknowedged experiences by which we are able to empathise with others.
A dance score in 9 movements.
Weaving between the work of three of Australia’s most acclaimed women artists and around writings by Julia Kristeva, dancer Tess de Quincey invites you into a feminine space, an environment where body and textuality coexist. This is a raw and edgy layering where resonances of women’s culture and female sensibility are assembled in a crosscultural, interdisciplinary synthesis.
This collaboration brings together breathtaking and provocative poet Amanda Stewart with the intense, monumentality of digital sequencer Debra Petrovitch and the subversive trajectories of new media artist Francesca da Rimini. Other women contributors bring elements from Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Chilean and Balinese female forms. Visual and sonic poetry is interwoven with a choreography that is based in a synthesis of Eastern and Western dance traditions.
“… Tess de Quincey is a formidable artist… her intense, many-layered, intricately worked creations where the body, decentred and edgey, negotiates the mutated, arcane landscape of contemporary culture… With Nerve 9 De Quincey and her collaborators have created an epitaph for our time.”
– The Age (Melbourne) Vicki Fairfax, 2002
This is a decentering which touches the flesh of everyday speech. The artists invoke a powerful and subtle negotiation of a potential infinity the place of the infinite’s emerging and of enigmatic substance determined by presence, absence and erasure.
Performances:
Tuesday 11 October 2005 @ 8:00pm
Wednesday 12 October 2005 @ 8:00pm
Thursday 13 October 2005 @ 8:00pm
Friday 14 October 2005 @ 8:00pm
Saturday 15 October 2005 @ 8:00pm
