Exchange with Reckless Sleepers
2015/2016
NAT CURSIO CO + RECKLESS SLEEPERS
Exchange 2015-2016
including performance of A STRING SECTION, Saturday 18 July
Nat Cursio Co. and Belgium/UK based company Reckless Sleepers come together for a creative exchange project in Melbourne in 2015, with a further meet-up in the UK planned for 2016.
As part A of this exchange in 2015 Nat Cursio and Reckless Sleepers will present a one off performance of Leen Dewilde's A String Section. It will be an Australian adaptation that serves as a very practical and highly immersive manifestation of shared practice.
This will lead to part B of the exchange - a lab employing questions, tasks, excursions, and provocations to explore practices, creative references, and previous work. The aim is to generate ideas for a new performance work and explore the language, processes and the means through which a new work could be made.
A STRING SECTION (Melbourne)
A String Section is one of Reckless Sleepers' suite of challenging, moving, and significant works. In 2010 Leen Dewilde started destroying things, smashing cups, breaking down walls, cutting up furniture and sawing the legs off chairs...A String Section started as one of these works, a small set of chairs, women and saws. A project where, the production of sawdust, the left over legs, the half broken chairs, the residue of the action was as important as the action itself.
Saturday 18 July, 6pm
The Coopers Malthouse, Bagging Room
Concept/Choreographer/Performer: Leen Dewilde
Direction: Mole Wetherell
Collaborators/Performers: Nat Cursio, Alice Dixon,
Caroline Meaden, Chimene Steele-Prior
"To describe this work as hypnotic isn’t enough—the state it induces is one of intense engagement with its presentness, in both a temporal and spatial sense. It is the feeling of a breath held for 50 minutes, all in the audience leaning forward, alert to every movement. It was only afterwards that I even began to consider the humorous associations behind the work—its deployment of classical music iconography—because the performance itself didn’t invite the distance required to mentally wander in those directions." John Bailey REAL TIME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Coopers Malthouse (Melbourne)
The British Council
The Flemish Government
A String Section was originally made with the support of INTEATRO Creative Residency