Field Hospital - Dark Mofo Hobart
Graphic
Team | Artistic Director Felicity Bott, Dancer Gabriel Comerford, Installation + Graphics Paul Wakelam
Completed | Concept Completed 2017
Photographer | Dermot McElduff
Field Hospital: Light, nutriment,
Field Hospital is a dance performance installation that aims to explicate the sensation of ‘coming to’; of returning to consciousness.
Using the time and space of the winter solstice as if it were a ‘hallowed eve’, Field Hospital is conceived as a somewhat hierophanic[1] ritual performed by a professional dance company over a full night in an environment that is transitory, in which all is borderline.
In Field Hospital, ‘borderline’ refers to any of the liminal interstices between profane/sacred; here/not here; awake/asleep; consciousness/unconsciousness; life/death; establishment/punk. The sacred and the profane hover together, like hierophant and heretic dancing together - willingly.
This is a winter solstice offering for performers, audience and invigilators to pause together, to perceive and to feel. It is an art-induced suspension of time and space: place to enter the dark, and return.
[1] A ritual that ‘channels grace’ such that the sacred punctures through the profane, ‘bringing light to’ the everyday and renewing sense of purpose, values, direction.
clothing, a face…An architecture of respite for a performance of aftermath…Insomnia, sleep,horror, vertigo, appetite, fatigue…A performance explicating elusive phenomena. Night as object. Bodies assailed by unformed, sensuous elements. Opiate-filtered perception. An architecture of pause for restless casualties. Field Hospital: Dance and design configured for the fulcrum of the year: A solstice offering for audience and performers to pause, agency surrendered, at-the-border. Field Hospital: An art-induced suspension of time and space. All are/all is ‘borderline’, transitory, waiting to heal, waiting to die, bodies supine in various depths of consciousness, liminal. Field Hospital: Human subjects birthed by disaster; fielding balls delivered by DNA and circumstance; arriving somewhere only as death comes into view; death viewed through an opiated haze…elusive, instructive. Dancers as ‘opiates’ that course through the space mimicking endorphins - nurse orderly doctor specialist shaman soothsayer apparition or angel.Field Hospital: Light, nutriment, clothing, a face…An architecture of respite for a performance of aftermath…Insomnia, sleep, horror, vertigo, appetite, fatigue…A performance explicating elusive phenomena. Night as object. Bodies assailed by unformed, sensuous elements. Opiate-filtered perception. An architecture of pause for restless casualties. Field Hospital: Dance and design configured forthe fulcrum of the year: A solstice offering for audience and performers to pause, agency surrendered, at-the-border. Field Hospital: An art-induced suspension of time and space. All are/all is ‘borderline’, transitory, waiting to heal, waiting to die, bodies supine in various depths of consciousness, liminal. Field Hospital: Human subjects birthed by disaster; fielding balls delivered by DNA and circumstance; arriving some where only as death comes into view; death viewed through an opiated haze….elusive, instructive. Dancers as ‘opiates’ that coursethrough the s pace mimicking endorphins - nurse orderly doctor specialist shaman soothsayer apparition or angel....Field Hospital.
