Lady Example
Presented by the Substation and Next Wave 2018
Presented by Arts House for DANCEMASSIVE 2019
Choreography, performance and direction: Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride
Performance: Ben Hurley, Fleur Conlon, Joanne White, Hannah Monson, Luke Fryer, Patrick Durnan-Silva, Emma Riches, Scott Elstermann
Lighting: Jason Crick (Next Wave Festival) and Jen Hector (DANCEMASSIVE)
Set and costume: Matilda Woodroofe
Sound Design: Emah Fox
Documentation for Dance Massive by Takeshi Kondo and photos by Bryony Jackson
Documentation for Next Wave by Mischa Baka
Awards
Nominated for four Green Room Awards - Best Ensemble (Dance), Best Production, Sound Composition, Performer (Caroline Meaden)
"...a phenomenal show that works even though, by all means, it should collapse under its own towering ambitions."
Jana Perkovic, The Age
"Lady Example is a bewildering bricolage of behaviours and performances, knitted together with total assurance. You feel that it ought to crumble beneath the weight of its own spiralling aspirations. Instead, I found myself enthralled by a precision of judgement and execution that draws together this unclassifiable work into a fascinating unity."
Alison Croggon, Witness Performance
An intentionally undefined, expansive horde of stimulus is ground down, knitted into a fine weave, over a slow process guided strongly by our intuition, and our personal baggage. We offer up a semiotic field for our audiences to wander through, undertaking your own journeys of recognition and confusion, completing the work with your own subconscious.
We describe LADY EXAMPLE as ‘a dance of bodies, words and women.’ We choreograph the moving, interacting body, as well as language, theatre, reference and design. From within the broad theme of ‘women,’ we found patterns emerging around performativity, role playing, teaching and learning, inherited behaviour and expectations. Our ‘libretto’ is drawn from a bank of miscellaneous language artefacts, gathered over four years, then mashed up and merged with the dance. The resulting “denatured language” (Alison Croggon) toys with recognition, and what to make of it is ultimately up to you (Personal responsibility, honey).
