Colony

This performance installation was created for the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres. After a rehearsal period of several months the work was only performed once on the eve of Adelaide’s first lockdown in March 2020 due to Covid 19.
Colony is one instalment in a series of works I have made responding to questions on the human subject and its relationship with nature, drawing on the posthumanities works of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. Colony is particularly inspired by Haraway’s deployment of the term the holobiont – or symbiotic assemblages – in order to speak of the intrinsic interconnectivity of species including humans, particularly bacteria and parasites which populate most areas of the human body and connect us directly to other species. Colony situates the humans within the construct of a colony – a cooperative system of interconnected bodies which might evoke a coral structure or an ant or bee colony. Through elements such as choreography and set design, Colony therefore asks how dance can reappraise our conception of the body and its framing within processes of nature.