SUNDER is a solo movement work using gravity as a site to examine the personal implications of a globalised existence. Bring together dance, unconventional apparatus and performance art this work draws on the artist experience as a multinational person, creating a collision between their ancestral story lines and their current experience as a queer ‘Australian’’.
This work was born in South Australia at MUD Experimental and Extended Domains 2022 as a collaborative project with artists Constantine Stefanou and Thomas Moran, forming the beginnings of an ongoing inquiry into the commons, collective experiential research, and working with non-human matter.
Lily further developed this work at Critical Path (Warrane, Sydney) at a 2 week solo residency in late 2022. During this time Lily developed the project to be a solo accompanied by live sound scores made of non human matter ( motors, rubber and metal ). Here Lily also brought together conceptual ideas looking for commonality between their current day experience as a young queer, femme presenting body, their experience as a white presenting multinational and the intersections these experiences have with class, elitism and the tragedy of the commons.
Intertwined with the aesthetic visions of flesh, sex, power, and helplessness this works narrative follows a subject negating gravity through immense yet almost silent force, pushing the body to extremes in order to break apart the relationship between weight and gravity. Until, finally they experience a unified weightlessness, a floating world inhabited all world possibilities, free from the weight of existing the subject hangs in the centre of the room by their toes. Here in this place the body becomes the site for gravity to inflict pain, a battle of mental stamina the subject must try to hold onto pleasure for as long as they can with stand the tearing of gravity against their bones and the overflowing pool of blood in the brain. Bursting with brooding ambience to witness this is a contract of discovery, of the self, of the other and of the world, inviting audiences to considered to consequences of the globalised landscape, intergenerational trauma and queerness, all in the presence of impressive athleticism and skill, a pure demonstration of what the body can really do.