VOID
Winner of Total Theatre Award In Association with The Place, Edinburgh Fringe 2018
VOID is a V/DA & MHz production in association with Feral. VOID reimagines JG Ballard’s cult novel Concrete Island through the lens of a black female protagonist - staged as a meshing of experimental dance and abstract glitch video landscapes. Blending typically Ballardian themes of liminal spaces and urban paranoia with contemporary theories from radical identity studies, Mele Broomes performs risk taking choreography to the backdrop of an industrial soundscape.
Prested: Tramway Glasgow, Dance International Glasgow, Festival del Silenzio Milan and Edinburgh Fringe Festival
AV/ Sound/ Set Design: Dav Bernard
Performance/ Choreography: Mele Broomes
Performance Direction/ Costumes: Bex Anson
Character and Concept Consultant - Ashanti Harris & Adura Onashile
Dramaturg: Lou Cope
Produced by Feral Arts
Photography by Jack Wrigley
“★★★★★
Void replaces Ballard’s white male protagonist with a black female one, and this shift brings the 40-year-old story right into the present day. Instead of a tragic figure trapped in the the amoral technological jungle of modernity, we see a desperate figure outside the system, trying to break in through the layers of privilege, patriarchy and institutional racism. VOID Edinburgh Fringe 2018
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“★★★★★
Broomes is elegant, stiff; undulating, and jagged…Hers is intelligent choreography informed of its own history and devoid of pretentiousness or self-consciousness.” VOID Edinburgh Fringe 2018”
“★★★★
Great credit goes to the dynamic Broomes, who generously turns herself upside down, literally and figuratively, to articulate the emergence of new ways of being, grounded in authentic experience” VOID Edinburgh Fringe 2018
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“★★★★
Punchy, intimate dance...Broomes has taken Ballard’s modern-day Robinson Crusoe and replaced him with a black woman, whose desperate attempts to adjust to terrifying and alien circumstances are revealed as a metaphor for the immigrant experience. VOID Edinburgh Fringe 2018”
“★★★★
VOID assails you, unnerves you on many levels with Broomes unstintingly at the heart of the risk-taking VOID Tramway Debut 2016”