I spoke about working with Sophie in an earlier post before a-n’s website went offline for it’s update, so I’ll recap here and talk a bit more about other things that she does too.
I’d worked with Sophie on a pot-luck artist collaboration day in St Helens late last year and it was interesting to share our practice and see how we could work together. So I invited her to develop the performance aspect of ‘Displaced Persons’. We tried out a few dance exercises, linking movement to verbs and the ideas behind the work. Seeing the different vocabulary of movement that Sophie used to me was eye opening and helped me to push the movements I was creating to some extent. Having someone to bounce ideas around with in a practical setting was also useful and we ended up with just using hands and arms in the performance part and using those as a projected element in the production of a stop motion drawing.
Sophie works as both a dancer and in the production/direction of performance pieces, so her experience as both practitioner and producer of others really helped. She’s currently working on ‘The Hacienda Tales’, a play on which she is co-writer/director which will be running at The Edinburgh Festival from 11 August. It’s a take on Chaucer’s canterbury tales, with Manchester’s Hacienda club becoming the cathedral the characters head to.
For more information about Hacienda Tales go here: http://www.liacconcepts.co.uk/the-hacienda-tales/#tabgarb=tab1
