Dance

if it’s all in my veins disrupts and reimagines the history of contemporary dance, unmoored from time and place in the digital age. Inter-generational cast Hellen Sky, Michelle Ferris and Georgia Bettens are accompanied by animated GIFs displaying excerpts of dance iconography. These tiny moments of dance history, reformulated through internet culture, are re-embodied on stage.

Furthermore the dancers are responsible for their own means of production, to speak in Marxist terms, moving stage lights to frame each GIF of dance history that they embody. Here, the labour of theatrical production is not hidden but exposed as the work re-constructs dance history before the audience’s eyes. if it’s all in my veins is a flamboyant and prophetic statement on how the past is produced and reproduced.

“We wanted to revisit the struggles that our dance has encountered to redefine our present dancing bodies. How can we envision our dance’s future if we proclaim it’s no longer possible to think through ‘a’ future? Is dance history over? Where do we direct our fiery optimism? What other histories might it give way to?”