Dance Plague with Flanker Origami

Dance Plague with Flanker Origami 

A global, dopamine dressed, social media danced promenade - a magical drift out of the norm in the heart of Edinburgh’s most loved theatrical sites.

Created and performed by Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean (Organic Theatre)
Developed in collaboration with writer, site-specific artist and mythogeographer Phil Smith.

This creative collaboration seeks to identify how the post-pandemic performative use of digital media is impacting on our relationship with a variety of environments and social/cultural spaces. 

Over the course of three days, we will be developing a hybrid danced promenade for social media and proximal audiences, investigating site-specific performance inrelation to digital and new technologies. 

We will be exploring how the performativity of site(s) interacts with digital devices and translates into social media practices, the entaglements between hybrid performance and the materiality of places, and how digital technologies are shaping our experience and vision of the physical world, our sociality and the way we assemble to each other and to the world within digitally constructed landscapes.

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Flanker Origami, two simulacra of theatre characters from a digital performance are searching for outdoor and indoor physical stages, and are still dependent on their camera to be witnessed by their audiences. 

Through a hybrid processional and carnivalesque dance, they set out to perform a communal ritual of purification, which flows through streets and theatre buildings, involving proximal spectators as dancing partners and social media spectators.

In a quest for a space of theatrical survival the danced promenade stages an excessive, exceptional and non-functionary drift through which Flanker Origami become interlopers in a public space, disrupting the everyday and crossing the private spaces of cultural organisations – backstage areas, workshops and stage doors – that the public is not meant to see.

The power of the Dance Plague invokes a lost heightened public performance space, using the magic of digitality to conjure it into liveness again. 

The social media promenade will be live streamed on Organic Theatre social media and will physically develop from Cambridge Street in Edinburgh (Scotland) drifting into the Traverse Theatre in a danced route towards the stages, exiting from the back door and resuming the procession around Grindlay Street to eventually reach the Edinburgh Castle esplanade, where it will disband.

Dance Plague with Flanker Origami

Live-streamed on Wednesday 17th May 2023 from Edinburgh.

Link to follow online:

https://facebook.com/events/s/dance-plague-with-flanker-orig/1541191086410423/