TONGUES OF STONE

proposal for STRUT and Perth Festival: (Nov’2008)

Project Brief

TONGUES OF STONE: A Performance Event for Perth 2010

12 Women speaking with their bodies through the city’s surface uncover sedimented histories.
Combining dance, architecture, music and film Tongues of Stone proposes a unique site-specific event for Perth.

The stone tongue is the speaking landscape.
Weaving between mythology and geology, stories and strata, Tongues of Stone will excavate the city to reveal its
embedded stories through movement, image and sound. Perth is considered an urban landscape built on stone, sand and
histories shaped by the surrounding mining industry.

Fed by the rivers of stories emerging from mythologies, dialogues with place and conversations with local residents, the
performers inhabit four states of change, which form a performance cycle for a mobile audience. Metamorphic processes
transforming flesh to stone; stone to dust; dust to phantom; phantom to flesh would form the conceptual basis for the
vision led by choreography and design. These would be expressed and embodied through moments of transformation –
for example from celebration to shame; shame to fervour; fervour to exhaustion; exhaustion to regeneration. The dancers
shift between extremes of physical endurance and epiphanies of humour and joy: from lamentation to ecstasis
… Myth becoming nature.

Concept: Carol Brown & Dorita Hannah
Choreography: Carol Brown
Design: Dorita Hannah
Music/Sound: Russell Scoones