ARCHIVE: Soma was a collaboration between choreographer/dancer Ogemdi Ude, dancer Talia Rothstein and myself throughout 2016-17. It had multiple iterations and performances most notably three sold out performances at La Mama Courthouse Theatre (Melbourne) as part of their Explorations series and an improvised performance based on the original score at the Off The Grid festival at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne).
SOMA is a dance theatre work that inquires into the notion of an embodied past, considering cultural, social and personal histories and how they influence our present moment. How does the body act as archive? How do our relative histories shape our habitual or performed physicality? How does our physicality in the present shape our memories of the past and intuitions about the future? Conceived by choreographer/dancer Ogemdi Ude (USA) and composer/sound artist Jack Palmer (Melb), SOMA uses sound and movement as analogy to challenge performers and audiences alike to investigate the stories that bring us into our bodies.
