Mechanical Organisms

I went to see the finalists for the Place Prize for Dance, on the 26th of April, a show where a great selection of contemporary dance pieces come together. My favourite piece was Riccardo Buscarini's Athletes, which I later found out won the first prize.

I scribbled some words and thoughts it provoked:

Mechanical bio-robotic creatures, cold-blooded reptiles, depending on each other for survival. Outer space ecosystem. Survival of the fittest. Nature's inevitable cruelty. Macro and microcosm: outerspace and microscopic level. Killing in the animal kingdom, eating, reproduction and death, function and instinct. Interaction, interdependence. Praying Mantis. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sound in space. Silence. Nature's cycle of destruction.

The pristine white suits the dancers were wearing, had an external spinal cord structure attached on their back, which gave another layer of associations to the piece: covering the bodies perfectly, hygienically sealed, unstained, the bones outstanding interlocking parts of a greater mechanism. This emphasised the idea of interconnected parts as the dancers smoothly slid around each other as a lubricated biological machine. Or perhaps as inner components of the inside body, like individual cells that live, eat, reproduce and die.