Eye to eye (dreaming hyper in visibility)

eye to eye grapples with the politics of looking, seeing and fantasising: the struggle to visualise the new when saturated with phantom images of the past; the potential misalignment of personal and collective utopias; and the fact that increased visibility does not equate to power. 

Using somatic practices, social dance, and various technologies of the gaze, the performance celebrates the radical potential of embodiment as a site of exchange in service of collective change. It asks what needs to be exorcised from the imaginative landscape, both from the technologies that reproduce it and the bodies that contain it. Binaries burn, and in the ashes, we rise to dream of a world unbound by the limits of the screen. 

eye to eye has been created with and performed by Amani, Pierre and Wet Mess. With set design by Rose Moya, costume design and styling by Justin Carlo Villamor and lighting design by Edward Saunders. Composed through a collaborative exchange, the work features an original soundscape scored and spatialised by Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones.

The performance considers what it means to visualise a new world while saturated by images and inheritances of the past, grappling with the politics of looking and the difficulty of imagining futures beyond the visual languages that shape us. Responding to this thematic tension through a materially driven textile approach, I produced a classical theatre drape reimagined in scaffolding mesh. The fabric was dyed and treated with layers of clay slip, giving it a worn, earthen surface. Suspended and draped from the ceiling, the textile operated simultaneously as a scenographic backdrop, while also functioning as a projection surface for live-streamed handheld footage. The textured mesh allowed light and image to move across and through the fabric, creating a layered environment in which moving image, body and textile interacted dynamically.