SLIP I'm not falling I'm just hanging on for as long you'll hold me Dance Theatre Work for Touch Compass

Abstract

What if the stories we carry around with us were to focus upon the contingent and the accidental? What if we acknowledge chance and slippage as our condition? The research imperative was to create a performance work that represented the individual stories of the dancers through movement and text. Using spoken and sung texts the challenge was to create an experience that communicated their inner lives in an unsentimental way. By translating their stories into song and creating a five song cycle for the work the choreography was able to move between the individual and the group opening spaces for an unsentimental appreciation of their diverse experiences whilst seeking to challenge stereotypical assumptions about disability and intellectual impairment. In the process of creating this new work we explored flying and falling and the in-between state of suspension. Driven by a desire to expose the intimacy of support, and the possibilities of surrender, we flung, krumped, collapsed and caught. The dancers wrote titles for an album of songs about life changing moments, they dressed up and down, and danced out of memories, risking everything and still moving beyond the fear of falling. Because the past is all we know of the future, they roll with their ghosts and catch their breath with the other.