Push towards the limit, challenging the wonder and amazement of the audience. This is the specialty of Motionhouse, a historic British company founded in 1988 by Kevin Finnan and Louise Richards, always oriented towards creating a unique style resulting from the fusion of elements of physical theater and contemporary dance. They present themselves for the first time in Italy with BLOCK, a performance for urban spaces inspired by the famous game Jenga, where the player must build a tower.
In the show, the parallelepipeds, the blocks, are about twenty: at times they resemble a pile of rocks eroded by strong winds, at times a city neighborhood under construction or demolition. Here the game is to see how this modular structure reforms and reconstructs depending on how the performers position themselves above and around it with their dance on the edge of what is allowed. Thanks also to the collaboration between Motionhouse and NoFit State, dance and extreme acrobatics collide, clash, and blend in a constant reverberation of transient shapes, the same transient nature of our cities, of our urban and natural landscapes in which it is the human presence that determines their mutations.
“The modern city – explains Kevin Finnan – is a nest that teems with activity. Life streams in a swarm of disparate occupations. BLOCK talks about life in the city, addressing its contradictions and challenges. We live large, we live fast, and sometimes we even live in the cracks.”
Motionhouse, an established British dance company, and NoFit State, the UK's leading contemporary circus, bring together their unique styles in BLOCK; a story of life in the city.
Twenty oversized blocks are deconstructed and reformed into an infinite variety of shapes for the performers to play on, move with and explore.
What happens when dance and circus collide? When they converge, rub against each other, blend into one another?
“The modern city is a nest teeming with activity” , explains Kevin Finnan, the Artistic Director of Motionhouse. “Human life streams through this hive of activity. BLOCK is about living in the city, its contradictions and its challenges”.
