Dance company Yewande 103 announces screendance Fountain.
Dance company Yewande 103 has announced its new production and screendance, Fountain.
It is a compelling work created by choreographer, educator, writer and activist Alexandrina Hemsley.
Fountain blends dance and “digital watery environments” to explore cycles of repair, loss, bereavement, joy and intimacy.
The work draws on the symbolism and “psycho-geography” of water as inevitably linked to black histories, embodiments, experiences and mental health.
Guided by an improvisational movement score, dancers Shahada Nantaba, Rickay Hewitt-Marti and Rudzani Moleya cycle through multiple interconnected, expansive states.
Contrasting digital visual effects of water that splash, vibrate, drench and flood the screen with a darkened theatre space, the trio shift between being seen, mirrored and camouflaged by water.
Fountain explores the undercurrents present in a racialised dancing body, through the spectrum of experiences within black subjectivities that water evokes, and the significance of oceanic passages and colonial carving up of water and selves within black existences.
Considering the water within our own bodies in relation to the other waters within Earth’s hydrosphere, Fountain looks at the inescapable tides of life and death, welcoming how our watery bodies exist simultaneously as tides, tombs and sanctuaries.
Creator Alexandrina Hemsley said “It’s an important moment to launch Fountain.
“It explores ways water can hold, care, wash away, as well as draw on and reclaim space; be that physical, emotional or psychological.
“This will be an access-led screendance production to promote black, disabled leadership in dance, to support and bring about change for artists who face health-based marginalisations.”
Fountain will show at Picturehouse Ritzy Brixton on October 30.
Pictured: Shahada Nantaba dances in Fountain by Yewande 103 and Alexandrina Hemsley Picture: Yewande 103