Four aerial dance works presented as part of this year’s Irish Aerial Dance Fest
- MAKOSH by Polina Shapkina (25 minutes)
- The Weight of Shadow by Sasha Krohn (35 minutes)
- Teeth by Rachel Strickland (10 minutes)
- When Lives Touch by Hannah Scully & Safire Hikari (25 minutes)
MAKOSH by Polina Shapkina
A work in progress, MAKOSH is a dreamlike memoir, delving into the hidden depths of the human psyche and holding a seance with the entities within. Aerial dance & contemporary theatre blend with surrealist imagery in this production from Russian-born, Irish-reared artist Polina Shapkina, in collaboration with dance artist Hannah Scully, and musician Ruairi O’Shea. You are invited to experience the tangled forest of the human condition, through the tempestuous personal lens of a woman born into a specific time, in a specific place and in a specific set of circumstances.
MAKOSH – An experimental commentary on the great human search for meaning, purpose, and belonging in a world of dissolution and chaos. Heavily influenced by the work of Carl Jung, MAKOSH is flavoured with slavic folk culture and soviet dystopianism, peppered with nods to David Lynch, Sergey Parajanov, and Alejandro Jodorowski.
The Weight of Shadow by Sasha Krohn
Based symbolically on true events, ‘The Weight of Shadow’ acts as a visual representation of a rapidly deteriorating state of mental illness. It is inspired by Sasha’s partner and collaborator Ciana Fitzgerald, a fine arts painter and experimental film maker, and depicted through enigmatic physical languages including dance, mime, and aerial acrobatics. The show portrays 24 hours in the melancholic world of a psychiatric patient desperately trying to hold onto their tenuous grip on reality.
Teeth by Rachel Strickland
Teeth is an excerpt from an in-progress show called The Monstrous Feminine. Teeth is the result of a 3-week artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, USA. All photos by Yunfei Ren.
Content warning: early loss of pregnancy.
When Lives Touch by Hannah Scully and Safire Hikari
‘When lives touch’ proposes a hybrid dance and vertical dance experience to observe a relationship with one’s self and that self’s relationship to another. Shifts through states of desperation, loneliness, support, humour and love.
The two dancers dwindle between becoming the mind, the closest friend, the mental illness, the lover, the memory…of the other. Relationships become coping methods. States turn into other parts of self. Body moves from unspoken voices.
