Part of Tramway's Dance International Glasgow festival, 9 - 24 May
'The Violet Hour' is a line from the poem The Waste Land by TS Eliot describing the sunset sky over London. This moment of temporal transition is reimagined in the performance The Violet Hour by Colette Sadler as the merging of real and digital realities. In this work, the real time and space of theatre is submerged in the fictional reality of immersive 3D digital video and light.
Intertwining dance, song and digital video, the work consists of three distinct episodes. Each one is driven by one of the three performers around thematics of love, de-creation and transformation. Moving between real and digital realms, it proposes a surreal exploration of the relationship between humans and our surroundings, stretching the notion of how we are both influenced by and implicated in the changing ecologies around us.
The performers are set in a landscape at a fictional 'end point' inspired in the mythological texts of Ovid's Metamorphoses, where human origins are founded in stone.
The choreography equips the performers with the imaginary of a futuristic body with heightened sensory awareness, connection and empathy with and for the silent and mysterious organic world around them. This dance work asks: Can new figures and narratives be found that stand in opposition to humanity's self-destructive drive and the natural disasters that result? And what intimacies, bodies and desires could these hybrid beings of plant life and human produce?
In a time when our relationship with the natural world is urgently shifting in ungraspable ways, The Violet Hour attempts to offer new phytopoetic mythologies in motion. This new work is an attempt to offer a potential future toward a more sensually entangled interdependence with the natural world.
ACCESS: Audio described, Highly Visual / No or Little Text, Touch Tour Box available
Audience notes
This production includes both flashing lights and strobe effect.
Recommended for ages 12+