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ARK1

Tanz Im August 2021

ARK 1 is a new durational solo performance and video Installation by Colette Sadler with Mikko Gaestel. It extends a body of work that Sadler has been developing since 2017 that thematises the future of the human in relation to technology and artificial intelligence.

Due to an irreparable error, “ARK 1” has become disconnected from its main network. Floating through deep space for centuries digital apparitions and hallucinations haunt the solitary humanoid AI onboard. Now in a state of deterioration, it attempts to make sense of its inbuilt information of past human existence. Which fragments of its data and value systems will be preserved or vanish into obsolescence?

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Choreography, Text & Video: Colette Sadler
Performance: Leah Marojevic
Video & Installation Design: Mikko Gaestel
Sound: Samir Kennedy, Heiko Tubbesing & Colin Self
3D Animation: Alexander Pannier
Dramatury: Alan McKendrick
Costume: Eyal Meistel & Zoe Sebanyiga

Temporary Store

Sophiensaele, Berlin 2019
Dance International Glasgow, TRAMWAY 2019

Concept and Choreography: Colette Sadler
Performers / Artistic Collaborators: Samir Kennedy, Leah Marojevic
Research Assistance: Maxwell McCarthy
Installation and Video Design: Mikko Gaestel
Light Design: Veli-Ville Sivén
Music: Elaine Radigue – Trilogie de la Mort
Costume: Rike Zoellner
Artistic and Dramaturgical Advice: Assaf Hochman
Photo/Image Design: Mikko Gaestel
Producers: Feral Arts

 

In a performance-installation ‘island’—suggestive of an exhibition space, a show-room, or a shrine— objects, bodies, and their digital spectres are on permanent display for all eternity. The performers are presented alongside ceremonial relics in a site pervaded by a fictitious corporate entity called Vessels Inc. This domain and the bodies/items it contains function as an archive; a  memory storage for information/life. Sadler searches for a choreographic interface between the realms of virtual and physical reality. Reinforcing the suspension of linearity and temporal progression, is Elaine Radigue’s score Trilogie de la Mort, based on the Tibetan Book Of The Dead.

Temporary Store is imagined as a ‘purgatorial pop-up’; a ‘post-temporal’ space where past and future intersect with one another, where time itself melts away to an endless unchanging now. The work thematises the ubiquity of time and death that conditions the physical body, by exhibiting the dancers as post-human ‘containers’. Any notion of an ‘inside’— previously associated with a soul or a desiring self — has been evacuated. Caught in a circularity of endless gestural loops, these commodified vessels carry the relics of human communication systems, yet share a single code. Pointing nowhere in a sea of nothingness, they become immortalised like works of art in a highly aestheticised environment from which ‘life’ has been removed. 

There is nothing to buy in Temporary Store, but there is a coin from ancient Greek mythology, once laid on dead tongues to pay the ferryman for a passage to the underworld over the river Styx. Referencing and enacting the ritualistic in its first and middle parts, the piece ends with an image of a monochromatic futuristic morgue, in which even vessel bodies will eventually become virtual shadows of themselves.

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Temporary Store - Relic 1 'pointing'

GoMA - Glasgow Museum of Art 2019

as part of 'Present Futures' Berlin

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Learning from the Future

2017-2020
Sophiensaele, Berlin - Nottingham Contemporary, UK - CCA, Glasgow - Britsh Council Showcase, Edinburgh Festival - Southbank Centre, London - Birmingham International Dance Festival, UK - TweetAkt Festival, Utrecht - DanceLive Festival, Aberdeen - Eden Court, Inverness - OGR Turino, Italy

"My perception of Marojević’s dancing suffers inevitable comparison with the videos of incredibly virtuosic movement that populate social media feeds. Coupled with the representational game of the android – an unforgettably human figure pretending an inhumanity – I notice myself not really watching this dancing, so much as searching for a flicker or fidget – a flaw, a failure, a betrayal of the body – any imperfection within this impeccable solo. But then, somehow, I fall out of that, and just watch with surprise and admiration – grateful to see a work and dancer so heavily invest in developing the skills to undertake this kind of movement." - Paul Huges, Exeunt Magazine

“Learning from the Future is a tremendous feat, both for Colette who sews her troubling seeds in the minds of those watching, and for Leah whose seamless, controlled solo is as compelling as it is haunting; emotional and captivating… Leah’s rigid back against the flashing block is a lasting image, as is her rippling stomach, and her shaking robot hands. If we are asked to think about the primitive power of the body, then Leah is the greatest teacher.” - Elizabeth Gregory, State of the Arts

"She utterly embodies the post-human; a robot without subjectivity that reacts as perfectly to the external world as it was programmed to do….It is a body that deserves ovations. Leah Marojević sits on the stage, laughs, drinks from her bottle, and receives the rapturous applause as a human being." - Arnd Wesemann, Tanz - Zeitschrift für Ballett, Tanz und Performance.

Choreography and Concept: Colette Sadler
Performance: Leah Marojević
Dramaturgy: Assaf Hochman
Music: Brendan Dougherty
Light: Samuli Laine
Photography and Video: Mikko Gaestel
Costume: Eyal Meistel

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RITUALIA

Commission for Scottish Dance Theatre 2019

Choreography: Colette Sadler

Choreographic Assistant: Leah Marojevic
Danced by Scottish Dance Theatre

Music/Score: Igor Stravinsky
Dramaturgy: Assaf Hochman
Costume Design: Rike Zöllner
Light Design: Samuli Laine

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