Waking en-dessous

Choreographed and performed by Susanna Hood

Music by Nilan Perera

Lighting by Rebecca Picherack

With musical collaborator Nilan Perera and lighting designer Rebecca Picherack, Susanna Hood fuses a dynamic and visceral vocabulary of voice, movement, text, and light to explore the shifting relationship between two people, a person and space, and the present and past. The work is best described as the poetry of movement, language and music, a poem based on the states of presence and absence, the voyage from one to the other, and the threshold in between. When you are in two places at once? Where are you? Anywhere?

The movement vocabulary of this 20-minute piece juxtaposes an angular and sharp precision that vibrates and tears through a confined space, with rugged animal sensuality that slithers across the floor. The music is developed live by the manipulation of Susanna's voice through the signal from a wireless microphone. The palette of sound includes speech and song, the manipulation of inanimate objects in the space, as well as the sound of Susanna’s body moving against surfaces in the performancearea. Interwoven with Susanna’s own text, the piece contains text and melodic fragments from “Every time we say goodbye" by Cole Porter, and text fragments from "East Coker" from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Rooted in the kinetic and aural rhythms of the piece, the lighting design moves the viewer through a striking and surprising duet between white light and total darkness. The piece is thus a collage of images set rhythmically to evoke and provoke a resonant emotional experience.

Waking en-dessous was premiered in Toronto in March 2004 and continues to travel throughout Canada as part of the company's repertoire.