Salome

The Horizontal Method

Andrew Sutherland, Joe Lui, Grace Chow and Olivia Hendry will work to erase authorship in a horizontal method of working where Andy+Grace and Joe+Olivia will respond to the story of Salome separately, and then Grace and Olivia will come together to meld their workings sans Andy and Joe.

As part of the Creative Development program at Winter Nights 2020. This project is undertaking a development and will not present anything publicly as part of Winter Nights.

What is your development/work about and what happens?

Salome, taking inspiration from the Biblical figure and the Wilde play, is a creative development in multiple parts that explores the creatives’ relationships to ideas of inevitability, agency and how the embodiment of the past informs our desire for, and fear of the future, using the dance of Salome and beheading of prophet John the Baptist as an entry point.

How are you developing your work?

There will be two versions of Salome explored in isolation from each other: one by Andrew Sutherland and Grace Chow, the other by Joe Lui and Olivia Hendry. Following this first stage, Chow and Hendry will utilise the visual and written materials documented from the first stage to develop and explore their own take on Salome. This will result in a range of creative documentation, incorporating research, image-making, text and video material, which will allow us to check in on our progress before approaching future development and the pursuit of a public staging.

What are you excited about in this project, and what are you hoping to get out of it?

We are excited by the prospect of extending our creative relationships and devising methods as well as de-hierarchising authorship. By this, we mean generating material originally authored or conceived by Lui and Sutherland, that is then given over to Chow and Hendry to further develop and to take creative ownership of. We hope to use Winter Nights to give ourselves a roadmap of possibilities towards the staging and performance of this work – with many potential versions of the same source material.

What are you exploring?

Lui and Hendry will respond to the politics of self-commodification and power in a social-mediatised world, considering media platforms as sites of both personal empowerment and self-destruction; while Sutherland and Chow treat the idea of Salome’s dance as the constant movement of the cells and the continuing action of the past, in a work loosely threaded around an autobiographical experience of living with HIV and the multiplication of HIV cells in the body.

Who is in your team or involved, and what is their role?

The creative development comprises of theatre/performance/dance-makers Joe Paradise Lui, Grace Chow, Andrew Sutherland and Olivia Hendry, each of whom are forming collaborative partnerships in a devising process. For this stage of development, Chow and Hendry are also the performers.

A creative development as part of Winter Nights 2020
Supported by Minderoo Foundation