Touring Overview
De Quincey Co creates interdisciplinary artworks from the city to the desert that engage audiences from different cultures. From the intense intimacy of a black-box theatre to a large-scale, site-specific event, our highly physical work focuses on the body and elemental forces.
We perform the senses, fusing the contemporary and the ancient to explore perception. Our work invites audiences to generate their own narratives and let their imagination unfurl.
Our work is based in the practice of BodyWeather that is a synthesis of eastern and western principles. It brings together both traditional and contemporary methodologies – embedded in an Australian and Pacific perspective.
We are offering the following performances for touring:
- FRAMED, a duet for ‘black-box’ theatres or galleries
- FLOAT, a solo on water
- NO COLD FEET, for outside and inside spaces
- WALKING ON WATER, dance, mist, voice and light (available soon)
We are available to create site-specific processes & performances involving local artists, and offer BodyWeather Workshops as an add-on to any performance or creative process.
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FRAMED – illuminating our inner life
…the 40-minute journey is as mesmerising as it is inexplicably profound. …the work is elegant, simple, complex, profound, stark, elusive – yet never daunting. It is wonderfully easy to watch and very effecting. …a wonderful journey of shared discovery. Australian Stage (about previous work in the series embrace: GUILT FRAME)
Choreography & Performance: Tess de Quincey and Victoria Hunt Sound Composition: Michael Toisuta Set Design: Russell Emerson and Steve Howarth Concept & Direction: Tess de Quincey
Two women are literally framed, at the intersection of visual art, theatre, dance, music and installation. In this spellbinding and intensely intimate, intercultural work, Tess de Quincey and Maori dancer Victoria Hunt explore paradoxes in miniscule yet immense changes of relationship as they traverse the eight emotional states of the Natyasastra, the cornerstone of traditional Indian arts as part of the ‘embrace’ series of performances.
The two BodyWeather dancers cross over from their Japanese training origins into Indian sensibilities as Australian and Pacific ancestries are exposed.
Duration: 40 minutes + post-show discussion (usually 30-40mins)
Set-Up: 1 day; set construction early morning, perform evening.
Touring Party: 1 Production Manager/Operator, 2 performers.
Supply locally: Lighting rig and sound system.
Availability: 2012-13
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FLOAT - slipping through time
Choreography & Dance: Tess de Quincey Sound Composition: Garth Paine Raft Design: Richard Montgomery
Our first forays as humans onto water occurred on rafts and stepping onto water also enabled us to walk out of Africa. As humans we carry memory besides imaginings for a future, connecting the physical and the spiritual world with the capacity to change. This simple but powerful piece, first developed for SiteWorks at Bundanon, is an invitation to be danced by a journey that articulates and connects different beings, vertically through time and horizontally through space.
Duration: 20 minutes
Set-Up: 1 day; prepare site early morning, perform evening.
Touring Party: 1 Production Manager/Operator & 1-2 performers (dancer and musician).
Supply locally: Raft built to specifications; Steerage rope; lighting and sound system.
Availability: 2012-13
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NO COLD FEET – site specific transformations
It’s free, it’s strange, it’s adventurous and it’s in the middle of city life. NO COLD FEET is…. an experience, incorporating the sights, sounds, smells and substances of our city into sixty minutes of weird and beautiful art. TIMEOUT
Dancers: De Quincey Co Sound Composition: Barbara Clare and Steve Toulmin Costume Design: Albert Baldwin Choreography: Tess de Quincey
Following on from our extremely popular 2011 presentation in the heart of Sydney, this event can be redesigned for new spaces. This is a journey for the whole family - an adventure at dusk for roving spectators that explores the elements of any site using flowing costumes and long poles to underscore architecture and humorous engagement with audiences.
Duration: 50 minutes
Set-Up: Director and Production Manager one week before opening to choreograph to site, prepare location and train local lighting and sound crew; dancers two days prior to opening.
Touring Party: Choreographer, 5-8 dancers depending on size of site & Production Manager
Supply locally: Conduit poles, lighting, sound system, 5 lighting crew and 1 sound operator.
Availability: 2012-13
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WALKING ON WATER (available soon)
Through fog and mist, dancers appear as spirit figures, walking and dancing on water. Delicately lit in the darkness, they move across the water with video images that enable close-up elements of choreography to be seen from the shore, whilst live song and music interweave. The work reflects on our ancestors and on global migration.
This piece is currently under development and we welcome expressions of interest for presentation on rivers, lakes or harbour areas.
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Local Site-Specific Processes & Performances
We can work with local producers to design a process that will engage local artists and communities in the creation of a site-specific performance that animates and highlights aspects of the landscape, buildings and histories. The final work can either provide an articulation through space, be a procession through a particular area or pop-up points around a specific location.
BodyWeather Workshops
BodyWeather proposes a practical but also philosophical strategy to the body and to the mind that develops conscious relation devoid of any specific aesthetic. Drawing from elements of both eastern and western dance, sports training, martial arts and theatre practice, BodyWeather is an open investigation which promotes a thorough re-examination of the body and an alert recognition of change. Training provides the opportunity to ‘map’ a sensorial understanding of body, condition and language.
Workshops can take place either inside or outside and can vary from one or two hours to one day, an intensive weekend or longer durations.
