selfie-sh
Credits
- Company
- Rambert
- Year
- 2021
- Duration
- 10 min
- Premiere
- Rambert, London
- Choreography
- Edit Domoszlai
- Music
- Andy Stott
- Lisa Gerrard
- Ludovico Einaudi
- Dancers
- Alex Akapohi, Adel Balint, Kym Sojourna
About the work
selfie-sh was created for Rambert’s choreographic platform 'Blueprints' and premiered in November 2021.
Two thoughts became an early frame for the work:
“It is the shattered, the broken inside of us that makes us perfect.”
(Haiku, unknown)
“Self-hatred and self-love are equally self-centred.”
(Mason Cooley)
From there, the piece began to explore the contradictions of our relationship with the self:
acceptance and criticism, wholeness and brokenness, self-love and self-absorption.
A meditation text centred on self-acceptance and transformation became another starting point —
the idea of quieting the critical voice and imagining the person we might be becoming.
But as the self turns inward and begins to investigate itself, something less easily resolved appears.
Sylvia Plath’ poem entered the work as a counterpoint to this promise of renewal.
Beneath the desire to accept, transform and move forward lies an experience of loss that cannot simply be escaped.
The choreography moved between these conflicting impulses: transformation and attachment to what has been lost,
the desire to become someone new and the impossibility of entirely leaving an earlier self behind.