Brisbane choreographer Nerida Matthaei is bringing her honest contemporary dance installation ‘angel-monster’ to Brisbane’s Supercell Dance Festival.
‘angel-monster’ will showcase among other dance performances, with a focused programme on strong female artists and works. As Supercell’s theme of ‘The view from here: Dance in the Asia Pacific’ is the focus for 2019, Nerida’s piece will touch on many issues regarding inequality and feminism.
“'angel-monster' is a contemporary dance installation piece. I started working on it around 2015 when I was doing my doctorate in creative industries, so I was really investigating new ways to create choreography and process. I've always really been inspired by particular topics or issues that are really important today,” Nerida says.
“The work has ended up being a collage of many different issues and stereotypes of being a woman today. Some of those things range from growing up and being told that you should be the ideal Disney princess, or that you're not strong or athletic like a boy. Or [being told what] clothing we're supposed to wear and things that we're not supposed to do in public; down to other things like memories of sexual or domestic violence.”
As a contemporary work, the process to create Nerida’s ‘angel-monster’ evolved over the years of its creation and production. Exploring many different processes in a large group of artistic contributors, Nerida and her crew experimented with different ways to explore the social issues through dance.
“We were open to a ‘creative room’. All ideas and memories were relevant. All experiences were relevant. So we would often have conversations about things then pick some bits that were interesting to us, and then explore it on the floor.
“We did a lot of what I call 'embodied reflection'. As dancers, a lot of our knowledge is embodied and then to kind of reflect on the topics we looked at, we tried to combine the two together. At the end of a day or week we would get up and improvise [dance], then I would pick out particular images or ideas that came out of [the improvisations]. We would use that as a starting point again.”
In hopes to spark conversation, Nerida believes that personal experience will help the audience grasp their own interpretation of the piece, and hopefully empower both women and men to speak on the issues.
“We've had some people come and see the work and then for them it has initiated some discussion that they hadn't had prior to seeing [‘angel-monster’] – so that is something that I really hope will happen; that people will see the performance then walk away and start a number of conversations that then end up making change,” she says.
Excited to take part in the festival alongside other artists from the Asia Pacific, Nerida is happy to see the new festival take life in its third year.
“As a Brisbane artist it is always really great to perform at home. We're currently on tour in Newcastle at the moment, and Supercell is going to be the last two shows for the tour, so I'm really excited for us to not only perform at home, but also in a great new festival in Brisbane, and finish our tour on a high note.
“I think Supercell is a great festival, it's a really interesting programme. [Co-founder and Curator, Kate Usher] has a really great vision.”
