10 October 2020, 18.00
OGR Cult | Binario 2

Colette Sadler
Learning from the future

Performance, 2017, 40 mins.
Free entry. Reservation required.
Access is allowed from 6:30 pm. The performance will start at 7:00 pm.

Choreography: Colette Sadler
Performance: Leah Marojevic
Music: Brendan Dougherty
Video: Mikko Gaestel
Light: Samuli Laine
Costume: Eyal Meistel
Dramaturg: Assaf Hochman
Producers: Feral

The Scottish choreographer presents a solo that reflects on the change of bodies in a hyper-technological world where physicality, as we know it, no longer exists. The dancer, on stage, interacts with lights and projections through movements that create a new choreographic language combining biological and technological. Colette Sadler imagines a post-human future in which bodies are on the verge of disappearing.

In Learning from the Future, the futuristic female cyborg BODY A inhabits a science fiction world. The functionality of BODY A is taken as a a poetic means to speculate on an inconceivable reality where ever accelerating flows of information and encoded data could dictate the manner in which bodies move and function. The Choreography uses movement to amplify the primitive power of bodies against the background of their dematerialisation and disappearance.

An imaginary future, in which the aims and needs of the human body are questioned, provides the starting point for this work. The piece evolves within a science fiction setting inhabited by the BODY A prototype: this inconceivable futuristic body is considered ambiguous as "alive", but also as a highly sophisticated bio machine. It does not possess self-awareness nor can it distinguish between inner-intention and external impulses. BODY A transcends the boundary between a self-perceived inner self and an external physical reality that normally opposes it. It is not subject to the uniqueness of an embodied position. Objects and bodies in this artificial environment share the same omnipresent disembodied "consciousness": such condition subverts the idea of self-agentiveness; the performer’s body in this choreography is taken as a mere container – a channel. It can be filled and emptied. It allows information to pass through it. Learning from the Future reflects on the replacement of the living body with the properties of the inanimate and the virtuality of its posthuman representation. The piece relies on the medium of movement to amplify the primitive power of bodies against the background of their dematerialisation and disappearance.

After Learning from the future Colette Sadler and Mikko Gaestel created the video installation BODY A presented at Art Night London 2018.

 

Colette Sadler studied ballet and earned a BA (Hons) at Laban Centre, London. A member of Transitions Dance Company ́95, she subsequently worked as a dancer for, among others, choreographers Liz Aggiss and Jeremy James Vicente Saez. In 2002 she started Stammer productions in Glasgow to support her artistic production in the fields of choreography, performance and curation.

Since 2006 Sadler’s dance works have been shown Internationally in numerous contexts for dance and visual arts including at Performatik festival Kaai theatre in Brussels, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, South Bank Centre London, TRAMWAY in Glasgow, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Nottingham Contemporary (alongside the British Art Show), Les Lattitudes Contemporains in France and at Visual arts Quadriennale in Dusseldorf.

In 2018 she realised the lm Installation work BODY A with Mikko Gaestel, presented during Art Night London.

In 2016 she curated the multi-disciplinary arts symposium event Fictional Matters at the Centre of Contemporay Art Glasgow. A second edition, Present futures, took place in June 2019. Her latest dance work TEMPORARY STORE premiered in February 2019 at Sophiennsæle of Berlin. Her work RITUALIA, commissioned by the Scottish Dance Theatre, toured the UK and Latin America in 2019. She currently works with director Lola Arias at Maxim Gorki Theatre of Berlin