Natural Basic
by Rebecca Jensen
— Body as barometer
Three dancers converge through clouds of thought and matter. Their movements register change like barometers — sensitive to pressure, to subtle shifts in metronome, to unseen forces acting upon them. Dinosaur-like, they attempt to carry the weight of deep time — caught between extinction and evolution — chewing up the future and spitting it back out again.
The natural basic waltz step is a three-part, clockwise movement. Originating in 16th-century peasant dances, the waltz has evolved through countless forms. In Natural Basic, this cadence becomes a starting point — a steady loop that drifts off-axis, its centre of gravity slipping. Reiterating, reversing, reabsorbing. The work inhabits a state of polycrisis.
“How do the conditions of contemporary planetary crisis shape the genres of temporal experience that make up the present?”
— Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time
Choreography: Rebecca Jensen
Performers: Rebecca Jensen, Lana Šprajcer, Anika de Ruyter
Sound Composition: Andrew Wilson
Set & Costume Design: Romanie Harper
Lighting Design: Giovanna Yate Gonzalez
Producer: Anna Nalpantidis
Understudy/Operator: Texas Nixon-Kaine
Brigid
by Alice Heyward
— Keening for buried, wretched, and imagined worlds
Brigid is a dance and sound performance inspired by the pre-Christian goddess Brigid — the radiant deity of fire and wellsprings — whose mythology connects to the origins of the Bean Sí (Banshee) and her caoineadh (keening). Guardian of creativity and the liminal thresholds between life and death, Brigid ignites, heals, and transforms.
The work unfolds through immersion and suspension. Interlaced with sonic and visual patterns, Alice Heyward and Oisín Monaghan / Oisín Ó Manacháin’s choreography reckons with the entanglement of grief and fear, stirring otherworldly encounters through both inherited and invented Sean Nós (old-style) rituals.
Choreography: Alice Heyward and Oisín Monaghan / Ó Manacháin
Performers: Alice Heyward, Oisín Monaghan / Ó Manacháin, Oonagh Slater
Sound Composition & Performance: Gregor Kompar
Set Design: Alice Heyward & Gregor Kompar
Costume Design: Chloe Hagger
Lighting Design: House of Vnholy
