PERFORMANCE: GHOST QUARTERS
With twenty-five years of professional practice behind her, choreographer and performer Tess de Quincey established De Quincey Co. in 2000, and it’s now Australia’s leading Body Weather company (Body Weather being an open-ended form of dance training drawing on both eastern and western performance traditions).
Her latest piece, Ghost Quarters, is the first “dream” of The Opium Confessions, an ongoing exploration into the writings of poet, adventurer, opium addict and essayist Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). During his teenage years, De Quincey ran away from school and slept rough in the countryside for many months. The experience left him with an estranged relationship to the domestic space, and a fascination with wilderness as architecture. Ghost Quarters draws on his post-traumatic visions to experiment with unusual spatial relationships, creating an intimate yet epic exchange between artist and audience.
Created in collaboration with Jane Goodall and a small collection of Sydney’s leading interdisciplinary artists, Ghost Quarters is both haunting and captivating, presenting the world as vast, uncertain and powerfully dominated by the changing weathers of the psyche.
A post-show forum will be held each night as part of the event, bringing together a diverse range of speakers, from poets, musicians and philosophers to social workers.
9-16 May. CarriageWorks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh. Entry by voluntary donation.
