Forward - Joe Moran

About

Forward, by British choreographer Joe Moran, is a bold, choreographed collection of live performance, installation and film, inhabiting spaces throughout Siobhan Davies Studios. The event is part of Siobhan Davies Dance's performance season, which questions the relationship between dance and performance art practices, shaking preconceptions and championing new points of view. Brought to life by 13 exceptional dance artists, Forward foregrounds the range of Moran's choreographic thinking, with contrasting works that modulate and reconfigure in counterpoint to each other. Charting the tensions and meeting points between full-bodied dancing and critical thought, the result is a complex and charged choreographed evening that invites its audience to negotiate their own engagement with works within and beyond dance. ‘I am fascinated by the multiple possibilities revealed in the experience of dance. It excites me that dance, through the moving body, can complicate or disrupt how we conceive of who, what and how we may be. Forward arises from this fascination: a fascination with the embodiment of multiple and, sometimes contradictory, states of being at once' Joe Moran, choreographer Forward brings together eight distinctive works to explore embodied inquiry through live performance and extends choreographic thinking beyond the body into other forms. Curation as a choreographic endeavour is a further extension of this experiment: bringing together individual art works, in different spaces and of different durations, to operate as a single changing choreographed whole. Highlights include Survey, a compelling solo for celebrated dancer Marina Collard that questions the nature of abstraction in dance in the face of the physical, human presence of the dancer. Surveyed, is a sound work that is a precise transposition of the solo into aural form. Singular is a durational performance installation which moves freely throughout the building, linking and at times interrupting the other works. The piece sets its performers conceptual puzzles to negotiate, complicated by highly specific choreographic directives. ‘Moran proved dance can speak a distinctly twenty first century visual arts language' — writingfromliveart.co.uk ‘Willfully deviant dance' — londondance.com