NANA BILUŠ ABAFFY
Post Reality Vision
Post Reality Vision
Concept/choreography: Nana Biluš Abaffy
Performers: Milo Love, Geoffrey Watson
This piece is about the brutal dance marathons of the great depression, where contestants danced continuously for up to 7 months and audiences could come and go 24 hours a day to watch - an early form of reality TV. Unemployed people entered the competition because they were given food but had to keep dancing while they ate it. They were only allowed to sleep for 10 minutes at a time, so many went crazy, committed suicide or died of exhaustion. This piece is also about the strange discovery that Michelangelo’s only known self portrait is in the form of St Bartholomew’s skin - a saint who was crucified upside down, skinned alive and beheaded. It’s about VR feeling more real than R. About VR empathy, public beheadings and the toppling of one image of power with another. But still getting lost in the plenitude of the human body.
NANA BILUŠ ABAFFY is an artist with a background in philosophy and a foreground in experimental performance and dance. Nana takes a maximalist approach to the artistic endeavour and works through dance, text, play, moving image and social intervention. She is interested in the pursuit of knowledge through embodiment and wants to know what her body is looking for. Nana believes that there is irreducible variation in the human experience and works towards establishing a space for that difference in search of landscapes where alterities can be envisioned. She is the founding member of a secretive collective that performs in explicitly illicit spaces and enjoys engaging in mixedup reality, ChoreoGraphic acts of extreme tree hugging, and site specific protest dancing.
This work was later developped into a full length work presented by Dancehouse as part of DANCE MASSIVE 2019.
Dancehouse, Melbourne - March 2018 - all rights reserved
Documentation by Cobie Orger.