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
The Wishing Well is a space inhabited with dreams. For the person who enters it, it can be full of possibilities or full of rejection. In it, one can devise a thousand strategies to be heard, but in the end, one can only hope.
The Wishing Well sound is a continuation what we started exploring with Eva during our previous work, Begin to Begin: a piece about dead ends. We were inspired by how in written stories different voices coexist to present different angles of that world to the reader. In a similar manner, we started playing with voice-over. This single female voice takes on all the possible roles existing in this magic tale to narrate, describe, experience, recall and live her story.
‘Full of observations and insights into the nature of hope’. Writing About Dance
‘I can’t wait to see it again in the finals.’ Erin Johnson, One Stop Arts
Choreography and text: Eva Recacha
Sound Composer: Alberto Ruiz Soler
Performer: Martha Passakopoulou
Lighting Designer/Technical Manager: Gareth Green
Assistant to the choreographer: Lola Maury
Finalist of The Place Prize 2013