BIRD

Bird, crow, blue bird, old bird. Sylph, swan, ghostly lover.

Bird is a solo performance work, created and performed by Katrina Rank.

 Live in performance and captured in film, Bird is a conversation between the past and the present.  These two aspects vie for attention at every moment. The past is clearly imprinted within the dancer’s body. Her body is deeply etched with grooves of familiar movement pathways, highways frequently travelled. You can see it in the undulating lyricism of an arm, a piqué of a leg. This is home and part of who she is. But the use of the familiar routes is challenged by a desire to be more than the past, to explore the myriad of possibilities that can be found in the present. In this precise moment, her movement combines past and present and transforms it to something new, something fascinating.

Bird is also a personal comment on ageing. On screen, the performer disguises her body beneath an opulence of feathers - used plastic, reworked into something sublime. Its decadence hides her body and its imperfections. It reflects the past swan, syph and ghostly lover.  Live in performance, the dancer is unadorned. She searches for cracks in the amour of her deeply etched body, where something unfamiliar and unexpected might arise.

Beholden by an audience, observed and supposed, the performer dances on the precipice. She balances on the knife edge between the past and the present, concealment and exposure, contemporary and classical sensibilities, environmental concerns and costume design while looking into the abyss and taking a leap of faith.

The work was performed and streamed during the hillsceneLIVE festival in November 2020.

To see the recorded movement the live performer interacts with, see below.

This work has seen various iterations.

It was first presented at Dancehouse, Carlton, Victoria in December 2018 and at the Bold Festival ACT in 2019.