What if, when we die, we don’t need to balance our accounts? What if, instead, we need to make a dance? A dance of death. Totentanz is a new piece of theatre from Shotput that approaches death with dark humour and an open heart. In a dance hall, two performers try to create the perfect dance of death – and fail each time. Over the course of the evening, they try out different shapes, different styles, different (sometimes glittering) costumes – trying and failing, laughing, kicking, and screaming, all in an effort to make the perfect totentanz. A cry against the unknown. A final dance at the afterparty. Witness their outrageous struggle, and peer into the mystery of death, and life. This is an intimate performance, with the audience immersed in the dance hall designed by Shotput associate artists Anna Yates and Emma Jones, with Cat Myers original music vibrating through the floor.
Shotput is conducting a photographic project around Scotland in tandem with the tour of the show. Photographs have a long relationship with the dead – after all, we ‘shoot’ someone when we photograph them. ‘A photograph is not only an image,’ said Susan Sontag, ‘it is also a trace, like a footprint or a death mask.’ Members of the community are working with Shotput’s team to create their own images of death, surprising commemorations of those who have gone. These images are displayed in our immersive dance-hall space for audiences to regard before and after the live show. Totentanz is funny and unsettling, an intimate spectacle of big dancing, haunted spaces, bold visuals, and arresting music – from one of Scotland’s most original voices in theatre and dance, Shotput. Come and join the dance.