Project O:
Voodoo

Out of the ashes of time, Voodoo rises. Project O think again about how best to use dance to explore, heal and challenge the violence of systematic oppression that haunts our every step. In a clash of tongues, colours, continents and histories. You are invited join us for this four hour ritual: Two brown women dance a dance to dance themselves out of the desire for and expectation of an aesthetic assimilation that upholds a system of white supremacy that is at once subtle, blatant and all pervasive. A dance as cartography, Project O map the movement of their memories and the gaps in their knowledge of what went on before, those histories that are repeatedly erased by being unspoken. Training their bodies to fall through time, communing with ghosts, conjuring new futures and describing a misremembered past, this dance is an ode to the present. A science fiction that addresses the desire, confusion and responsibility of being a single subject who is also a symbol of many long-persecuted people, whose faces shimmer behind and beside our own in the eyes of others.

Voodoo asks you to pay your respects, make peace with your dead and ours, lay down your defences and dance.

CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Project O (Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson-Small) ASSISTANCE Fernanda Munoz-Newsome, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Katarzyna Perlak COMPOSITION Verity Susman LIGHT DESIGN Sarah Readman SET DESIGN Charley Fone, Naomi Kuyck-Cohen SET BUILT Elouise Farley

Commissioned by Sadler's Wells. Co-commissioned by Cambridge Junction and Chelsea Theatre (2015). Supported using public funding by Arts Council England and by MDI (Merseyside Dance Initiative) with residency development and preview at LEAP 2017. Voodoo also previewed at In Between Time 17. Additional support from Dance Research Studio, Chats Palace, Greenwich Dance and Trinity Laban. media partner: Jungle World, Missy Magazine, taz.die tageszeitung, Zitty Berlin

Foto © Jack Barraclough + Katarzyna Perlak