Page 30 - Mistranslation Laboratory: An Unfolding

Auckland, New Zealand
In Auckland for Experimental Dance Week and the Fringe Festival, we collaborate with designer Sean Curham to develop a night-time iteration of the laboratory. We’re exploring
how the lab’s interior life may be made luminous, surprising - another world within a world.
Sean designs about 20 states from tiny lights, rigged so throughout the night the laboratory state-shifts from pharmacy to library, to dance party to changing room, and on and on, different objects taking on a dramatic life of their own. We
are accumulating poetic language as a form of whimsical collaboration, attending to the musicality of sensing. We’re performing the process of writing itself as embodied and graphic improvisation, a site of play and of a mode of relationship. We want to enfold all the bodies within sensory reach, as the work produces a world, as the
world produces the work.
To un-map proximity and distance, skeletal organisation, degrees of temperature, forms of alignment, states of structure and states of fluidity through the attentional folds of performance scores.
To allow the bacterial sprawl of ideas to take place. To take particular interest in glitches and losses
– the sites and moments where human intention becomes mangled by circumstances and by failures, taking things beyond human imagination.
To not know in advance which parts of the performance will be enacted. To prepare for our fallibility
to be witnessed, as part of the greater fallibility of systems and hopes in which we are caught.