Love for the Dead Bag

Solo performance, 40 minutes

Love for the Dead Bag is a love song to the body: a soul retrieval ritual doubling as public performance. This 45 minute solo performance features Butoh dance, live voice and speech which is captured and layered into a sound score that then interacts with the moving body to create further meanings and multi-sensory images. 

The ‘dead bag’ of the title is the human form, and my intention is to show its emergency in modern lifestyles: abandoned in favour of virtual realities (internet etc.), unnaturally restricted (office life etc.), medicalised, subjected to corporatised lifestyles and diets. I have the feeling that somewhere underneath these the body itself is crying out for help, and maybe even offering to help us understand why 21st century life feels so pressured. I see us suffering from a virtualisation of the social body and lack of fleshly, energetic intimacy and contact.

Throughout Dead Bag there is a blurring of time and space through looping, breakdown and cutting intended to open up the possibility that each moment of our embodied existence can be experienced in infinite ways once our habits of seeing have been discarded, and once we use our modern hyper-attention to interrogate embodied experience rather than as a way to escape it. 

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