This August, multi-arts space Platform Arts brings Sarah Aiken’s critically acclaimed performance Make Your Life Count to Geelong.
Sarah Aiken’s ambitious dance-theatre work shifts scale in a heartbeat – from the microscopic to the universal, inviting audiences to reflect on society’s evolving culture of the ‘self’ under techno-capitalism.
This powerful feat of imagination grapples with the paradoxes of contemporary identity-making, in which Aiken portrays the individual “as swollen to grotesque importance while also reduced to an ineffectual, even invisible impotence.”
“In my work, the body is magnified – huge, cumbersome, powerful – while in dialogue with the shrunken, ineffectual or invisible self,” said creator Sarah Aiken.
“It considers authorship & the cultural performance of self by building, destroying, and replacing a version of myself – a ‘Sarah’ who is her own protagonist as a hero in a neoliberal dream, at the cost of everything else.”
“Make Your Life Count looks for ways of softening focus on the individual to lose oneself in the patterns of community, ecology and history,” said Aiken.
Winner of Best Visual Design for the 2023 Australian Greenroom Awards, Make Your Life Count fuses video technologies with live performance to deliver a powerful exploration of scale, power, and the complexities of a culture focused on individuals that are self-actualised at all costs and pitted against each other. Make Your Life Count features original sound compositions by Andrew Wilson.
“Platform Arts is thrilled to tour and present hybrid film/performance works that are new to the Geelong community,” said Platform Arts performance producer, Penne Thornton.
“Our region is growing its appetite for exploratory arts experiences, especially those that deepen our sense-making in a world of increasing digital entanglements. These seismic technological advances are shaping how we expand or limit our self-expression.”
“Make Your Life Count is a sensory-rich provocation, inviting audiences to spark or sustain their own conversations, which is critical right now,” said Thornton.
This critically acclaimed work premiered in 2022 at Arts House, Melbourne, drawing broad audiences, full houses and standing ovations.
“…definitional, capstone works of the emerging generation of Australian choreographers.” – Jana Perkovic, The Age
Make Your Life Count
Platform Arts Performance Space, 60 Little Malop Street, Geelong
Dates: 10 – 11 August 2023
Information and Bookings: www.platformarts.org.au
Image: Sarah Aiken – photo by Gregory Lorenzutti