What Came Before
RESTORE 2024
What Came Before 2024
PICA and STRUT Dance
Restore
29 May – 1 June 2024
Frameworks, infrastructure and future planning are commonly discussed as essential elements for addressing society’s most urgent issues. In a culture that reveres ‘honest work’ and manual labour, where does creative labour fit?
Serena and Emma playfully use What Came Before choreographically and architecturally to be creatively economical and draw attention to the labour of change. As natural resources dwindle, workforces are patched over and creative industries continue to remain precarious, what might two semi-retired dancers and a builder offer to this conversation? Both strive to create infrastructure and frameworks throughout the performance and both work with what already exists.
What Came Before aims to combine the simplicity of construction and dance within the same space and time, prompting the audience to reflect on their views of meaningful work, impermanence, permanence and their relationship to feminised work.
Created: Emma Fishwick and Serena Chalker
Performed: Emma Fishwick, Serena Chalker and Michael Bullock
Lighting design: Peter Young
Sound design: Tristen Parr
Understudy & rehearsal assistant: Isabella Stone
Thanks to Jo Pollitt and Sam Fox for the previous and ongoing conversations with this work.
PICA and STRUT Dance present Restore – a triple bill of new and recent dance works from artists across the Asia-Pacific. Restore 2024 is a pilot program that spotlights restoration, connection and exchange in the region with an eye to sustainable creative choreographic practice. In 2024 Restore features a new commission from Boorloo (Perth) and West Australian premieres of existing works from Naarm (Melbourne) and Aotearoa (New Zealand). The three works express diverse perceptions of the world through different places, temporalities and roles.
All images & footage by Edify Media.
