Let Us Sell You (Your Burial)

Photographer | Jorge Serra

Let Us Sell You (Your Burial) is an experiential, immersive performance interrogating the cultural phenomenon of burials. Participants are invited to experience the work as a custom-designed collective burial. A once in a lifetime experience.

This intergenerational + interdisciplinary collaboration between Ruby Donohoe, Nadia Milford, and Sharmila Nezovic will collide ‘plastic fantastic’ against earthy materiality in an intersection of visual arts, dance, and immersive performance practice. At the heart of the work is the potentiality of pleasure and estrangement as performance dramaturgies.

The work invites audiences to explore a spectrum of embodied understandings and perspectives on why embedding ourselves within the earth is such a significant cultural tradition. This research is an attempt to excavate new potentialities for how this desire might be reimagined in an era where we are increasingly disconnected from the earth beneath our feet. The work pursues pleasure as a vehicle for reconsidering the relationship between body and environment; temporality and sensation; experience and product. How do we get in touch with our own materiality and the materiality of the planet without it being anchored in death or grief? And how do we sell it?

The work unpacks the containment and commodification of natural landscapes as a by-product of commercialism and convenience. Given the prospect of looming gentrification and expansive urban development within the region, considerations of the environment and our relationship to it are becoming increasingly important to the community and the changing identity of the coast.

The work mines references from consumerist culture, pop culture, advertising, and ritual to explore the shared driving force behind both paradigms - pleasure.

CREATIVE TEAM
Ruby Donohoe
Nadia Milford
Sharmila Nezovic

UPCOMING
IN | artist run initiative x The Old Lock Up
21 - 27 November

PREVIOUS DEVELOPMENTS
2021 Supercell Contemporary Dance Festival
2022 4 Walls and a Floor Dancenorth Residency