This piece emerged thanks to a commission from Yale Institute for Sacred Music. It has been performed at Yale ISM, New Haven, Connecticut and at ONCA, Brighton in 2023, and at Ecarte Conference, Ghent, Belgium in 2024. It was also supported by ACCA, Falmer.

The idea for Last Dance came not only from our deep and prolonged thinking around species extinctions, but also from chronic feelings of helplessness associated with the pandemic and climate change, and the cycles of news we are constantly exposed to – the relentless horrors of war, climate chaos, economic collapse.

• How do we deal with irreversible change and the aftermath of loss? 
• How do we find purpose, meaning and even joy in the face of loss, ruin or collapse?
• What happens when we face impossible choices? 
• How do we create ritual out of chaos, and the transpersonal through the creative act?

Through the performers’ visceral exploration of the ways in which we deal with the death of something we love, we face the struggle to accept our powerlessness and redefine what power could be. The piece explores how expressive culture can use metaphor to move beyond romantic escapism and individualistic narratives (facets of extractivist capitalist culture) finding ways to transcend them and re-vision future possibilities.  

Last Dance is a performance ritual. A suspended form resembling an abstracted body, made of fabric and filled with sand – a quarried natural material – will be animated by us. At any time, one performer will partner the object in a strange dance. But it has a small hole through which sand pours slowly out. So this suspended body with which we play is gradually changing, shrinking and eventually becoming soft and lifeless. 

Visually inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ suspended sculptures, the piece is a study of loss, cycles and tipping points: when does something stop being that thing? When something changes beyond recognition, how does that change how we interact with it? 

photo by Nora Heimann