With motherhood as a point of departure, Aftermath explores the sense that ‘something is over’ and questions what comes next.
During the making of the show, Recacha carried out an outreach programme for mothers and their small children, immersing herself again in that period of early childcare and its impact on the mother’s sense of identity and agency.
Inspired by Recacha’s own experience of motherhood and the social isolation that can accompany it, Aftermath questions what it means to live in a ‘post-everything’ world – post- feminist, post-truth and now post-time. The show imagines a world where the characters are dead, where change is no longer an option and no future awaits. Is motivation possible in such a world?
The audience is seated within the performers’ arena. They are part of the dancers’ journey and yet they are not directly involved. Aftermath comments on our reluctance to act in the face of certain situations, and on the normality of this passivity.
“giddy, ridiculous and amusing two-hander”
“Eleanor Sikorski and Charlotte Maclean weave patterns of wit and absurdity in Eva Recacha’s quietly radical show”
“The pair heat up to a giddy, edge-of-madness energy reminiscent of early French and Saunders.” – The Guardian
“It’s perfect casting with Sikorski as the acerbic, calculating wit and Mclean as the mercurial creative force; their two trajectories start on a fragile thread and fuse together to the point of familiarity and mutual admiration.”
“With its cross between The Private Life Of and Monty Python, Aftermath is as much an exploration of ennui as a picture of the divergent elements of artistic endeavour.” –
Writing About Dance
Coreography: Eva Recacha in collaboration with Charlotte Mclean and Eleanor Sikorski.
Sound design: Alberto Ruiz Soler
Lighting Design: Jackie Shemesh
Set and Costume design: KASPERSHOPHIE
Performance: Charlotte Mclean and Eleanor Sikorski
Co-writers: Charlotte Mclean, Eleanor Sikorski, Eva Recacha
Dramaturg: Simon Ellis
Production Manager: Emma Wenlock-Bolt
Producer: Johnny O’Reilly
Sound artist and composer
BROUHAHA takes a hybrid form, flirting with the principles of sound installations and stealing from the intensity of trance rituals.
Mixing chimeric movement material with haunting vocalisations and cavernous soundscapes – it places the audience in an abstract and timeless sea of swirls and loose harmonies, resisting any settled interpretations.
Three performers, not bound by touch or sight but by a common sense of presence and listening, migrate together in space. Subsumed into a larger mess they glide around each other and drift, connecting through sighs, whimpers and chants. Their disjointed mass journeys seamlessly, leaving traces of confused clamour as it absorbs the viewer in an ambiguous and unsettling chaos.
BROUHAHA is the fruit of a mature collaboration with choreographer Lola Maury. Seven speakers, some in full view and others hidden on the dancer’s bodies, make sounds travel and immerse the audience in moving soundscapes. The relationship between performers and sound is porous; the voices within the sound score imperceptibly manifest in the voices on stage and vice versa, keeping the origin of sounds unpredictable and woolly.
Part of the audiences are placed on the right and left edges of the stage to create an intimate tri-frontal configuration.
The performance is a meditative and refreshing experience. It creates a sense of being taken away, lifted up out of the individual, distinct aspects of the human experience (…) You are left with a sense of peace and calm, a sense that the enveloping, immersive chaos of sounds and movements of the past hour or so has returned to the same silence and stillness from which it emerged. Jonathan Platt. WooWoo London.
What sounds come from the performers and what are embedded in Alberto Ruiz Soler’s ruminative, diaphanous score is difficult to tell, but Maury and her team seem to be setting up a theme of acclimatization that tests not only our senses but our expectations of what a perfor- mance might be.
The smooth articulation of the performers is independent of any known narrative and defies any recognisable relationships (…) We might think of the work as relating to space and time in an era before our definitions of such notions began to measure, control, change and transform them. Or is Maury channelling a response to the Anthropocene by layering corporal landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes on to one another in a brouhaha of vertebrate chaos? Nicholas Minn and Caterina Albano. Writing about dance.
Choreography: Lola Maury
Sound Artist: Alberto Ruiz Soler
Performers: Juan Corres Benito, Alexander Standard, Laureline Richard
Lighting Designer: Ben Moon
Costume designer: Cesca Dvorak
Commissioned by Theatre in the Mill and The Place. With financial support from the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England. Further support from Dance4, YorkshireDance, DanceCity, Cambridge Junction, Hull Truck and La Briqueterie.