It’s ballet, it’s coming to Campbelltown Arts Centre and its title does not provide any clues as to what this show is about.
Scum Ballet is certainly not a show about nothing.
In Scum Ballet, a choreography for five dancers, fantasy is the weapon, the body is the ammunition and the target is forever transforming.
The female body has always been sympathetic to secrets, magic, transformation and cruelty, and gatherings of females have always produced fear and mystery, or the fear of mystery.
Developed by choreographer and dancer, Angela Goh, Scum Ballet is a patchwork of power, desire, violence and tenderness, according to the publicity blurb.
Scum Ballet slows time, but with an accelerationist attitude, not in order to produce new futures, but instead to assemble a multiplicity of fantasies.
The beauty and the horror is that the danger is always moving, reforming, and shapeshifting, like an ethereal being, unable to be named but definitely real enough to be felt.
Continually forming and unforming notions of control, it uses seduction as a means for transportation, not between places or times, but between moods and sensations – more difficult to define, but much easier to get lost in, not somewhere to settle, but something which is constantly unsettling.
We know what you did last summer, but last summer could be any summer, because when knowledge is embodied it isn’t a matter of timing, but of feeling.
Goh, the creator of Scum Ballet, works with dance in theatres, galleries and telepathic spaces.
Her work often deals with tropes of femininity, the supernatural and dance, as both a form and as a force.
Her work has been presented around Australia as well as France, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, UK, the USA and South East Asia.
Recent presentations include the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Art, Next Wave Festival, Auto Italia UK, and Performance Space, as well as appearing around Europe as part of Galerie’s Group Show, including at the Saal Biennal, Tallin, and La Biennale de la Danse, Lyon among others.
Goh regularly collaborates and performs with other artists, locally and internationally, in events including the Biennale of Sydney, Dance Massive, and Impulstanz International Dance Festival.
As for Scum Ballet, well, you may have check it to make up your own mind what it’s about.
SNAPSHOT
What Scum Ballet
Choreographer Angela Goh
Where Campbelltown Arts Centre
Performers Angela Goh, Eugene Choi, Ellen Davies, Ivey Wawn and Verity Mackey
When Friday and Saturday, November 24 and 25, 7.30pm
Tickets $20 General Admission | $15 Concession
