Body Corp by Sarah Aiken
14 – 25 May 2025
Sarah Aiken makes dance that warps perspective. From ecstatic astrological experiences with Deep Soulful Sweats to the national tour of Make Your Life Count, her work illuminates the body’s relationship to the world, and how we see ourselves within it.
Body Corp is a choreographic collage that blurs the boundaries of bodies – creating mythic figures, complex with our connection to nature and technology. Patch-worked, multi-form choreographies evoke the unreal, travel in time, transfigure self and reality. Dancers merge with machines to become hybrid creatures and monstrous assemblages: augmented, impossible, expansive and porous.
A dance of assembled parts, Aiken’s choreography is infused with magic realism, evoke the unreal, travel in time, transfigure self and reality. This innovative dance work muddies the divide between the human and non-human ‑ asking what inhibits our ability to connect with, empathise with, and learn from the non-human world.
Much of Aiken’s work discovers and investigates the roles of audience, performer, subject, and object to consider performance as a mode of empathy and exchange. Her interests in assemblage, authorship, scale and self are reflected within the choreography of Body Corp.
The use of collage and assemblage in Body Corp involves screens and digital technology as well as costumes made with found object aesthetic. Aiken is fascinated with the point of joining, the digital seam and the imperfections of the tools she’s working with.
This new project has roots in previous works, combining the inventive use of digital technology of Make Your Life Count with her ongoing interest in ecological questions and the climate crisis seen in What Am I Supposed To Do (WAISTD).
Body Corp is a mesmerising and imaginative dance work that illuminates both our growing interconnection with technology and disconnection from the natural world.
Sarah Aiken is a Naarm based artist, performer and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Her recent work ‘Make Your Life Count’ (Greenroom Award winner) premiered at Arts House Melbourne in 2022 (Platform Arts, PICA Perth and Sydney Dance Company) and received video presentations at Federation Square, Gertrude Street Projection Festival, MCA, and Frame Biennial of Dance. Other works include ‘Spanning’, ‘Demake/Demaster’, ‘Piece for pieces’ and ‘SARAHAIKEN’. Aiken is a co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, inviting audiences into thoughtful performative experiences including participatory zodiac dance, ‘Deep Soulful Sweats’. As a creative and successful choreographer, she considers the relationship between the audience and the performer and the art created, hoping for an exchange and connection between the two.
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