Dancer/choreographer Sarah Xiao and composer/musician Liam Bellman-Sharpe create work that is experimental and constantly in flux. By combining improvised and precomposed vocabularies and syntaxes, and never making it clear which is which, their work draws attention to the performative frame itself, and so to the unconscious subconscious lenses we view life through. By deliberately cultivating elements that change performance-to-performance, they embrace their capacity as performers to surprise themselves and each other. In other words, their work is concerned with what you choose and what you don’t; what you control and what you don’t. A work is never finished; there is no final form, no final artefact, and material is freely repurposed and reconstituted between projects.
In From/To Nothing, Sarah and Liam continue to push the boundaries of form, and of their own disciplines. By combining dance, movement, electronic composition, found text, opera singing, objects, poetry never intended to be read aloud, live vocal looping, technology, and their sheer trust in each other as performers, they will create a work that vacillates between sparse and oversaturated, and questions the ways we make and interpret meaning as performers and audiences.
Presented in partnership with Yale-China and the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media.
From/To Nothing
