Power, precision and impressive experimentation – these are the qualities audiences can expect to find in The Next 14 Seconds, the latest production from award-winning Brisbane artistic ensemble Phluxus2 Dance Collective, premiering at QPAC on November 28.
The show is an immersive dance and sound experience that is the work of a diverse coterie of Brisbane creatives including Phluxus2 creative director and choreographer Nerida Matthaei; Regurgitator band member Ben Ely; co-director of feminist performance collective Polytoxic, Lisa Fa’alafi; sound designer Haami Te Kuru; lighting designer Keith Clark; and dramaturg Daniel Evans.
Drawing from the varied disciplines of dance, theatre, visual art and sound design in order to explore human evolution and its future direction, the production has its creative roots in Covid 2020 and was inspired by the ways in which the world was collectively processing the distress, trauma and feelings of lack of control brought on by the global pandemic.
“I think that the last couple of years have been so up-and-down for everybody and that really affected the journey of this show creatively,” Matthaei says. “I had a piece in mind that I wanted to create and then throughout 2020 and 2021 things just evolved in my mind and the work took a completely different direction. In my eyes, the ideas changed because I guess the world was really changing and what was important to us as artists and as people was changing too.
“Covid had a real creative impact on the evolution of the show. It was a pretty big curveball to be thrown but, at the same time, I’ve always been really drawn to create work that speaks to issues or things about the way that we’re living now that are really important to us right now. As artists, we process the most extreme emotions that are part of our lives, the good and the bad, through the art we’re making.”
Matthaei says The Next 14 Seconds derives its title from a scientific paper she read, from which she learned that, in the infinite cosmos in which our world exists, human existence itself is said to represent and embody a mere 14 seconds.
“The show is about what’s coming next, what’s tomorrow and how can we change our journey from here going forward,” she says. “I think that in order to do that we need to look backwards first so that we can establish where we’re at today and that will enable us to take that step tomorrow. Covid really shook everybody’s perspective up.
“For me, and for everybody in my circle, we were asking questions about why we’re here, wondering, ‘What is our purpose?’ Our world is changing and there’s a lot of really critical decisions and changes that need to happen now.”
Phluxus2 Dance Collective was founded in 2006 to enact opportunities for choreographers and dancers to create and perform new contemporary dance work. Now a collective of more than 100 artists, the company has a commitment to crafting and producing genre and boundary-pushing deeply innovative works for touring and performance.
Their 2019 production, the Brisbane Festival hit Angel Monster, toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and saw the collective win the prestigious Best in the Fest Award two years running, in 2022 and 2023.
Described by Matthaei as “a portrait, a requiem and a call-to-arms for sisters, mothers, angels and monsters alike”, the show’s success was an enormous confidence boost for the choreographer and the creatives with whom she collaborates.
Key to Matthaei’s creative methodology is an unusual approach to creation and creative evolution. Unlike many choreographers and dancers, who derive a degree of comfort from a piece being finalised before its premiere, she is committed to allowing her works to evolve beyond the strictures and confines of opening night.
“My process is quite cerebral in a lot of ways. I think a lot, I plan a lot and I like to deep-dive into research,” Matthaei says. “Theory and research are really important to me, but I am also really embodied, which means that a lot of the way I create has to come through the body and in the studio. I like to work in a way that I guess is best described as really experimental and I like having time to play, so the work will be more-or-less ‘finished’ for opening night, but it’ll also be changing.
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“When a work meets an audience, it changes. So, we know what it is, but we don’t know what other people’s responses are going to be, which is always going to shift things and mould things. We’ll learn from that then when we do it next time there’ll be changes, inevitably. There’ll be things that we can shift and adjust and those things will be revealed to me by the people watching the show, the way they watch the show, the energy they bring to it and the way they react to it. There’s always something to change and something to learn.”
The Next 14 Seconds plays the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, November 28-29.
qpac.com.au
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