Connecting Stories

A project the first of its kind. QL2 Dance (ACT), Australian Dance Party (ACT) and Catapult Choreographic Hub (NSW), supported by the National Portrait Gallery collaborate to create a cross-generational, cross-regional dance project.

The collaboration built from YGEN to IGEN, a project which began in 2020 with ADP and QL2 working together across ages and stages of dance artists to create together, learn from each other and be inspired by all that dance brings to their lives – across our lives.

Connecting Stories was a commission of the National Portrait Gallery, with two iterations ‘Connecting Stories: Innovation’ (April 2022) & ‘Connecting Stories: Generations’ (June 2022), developed to reflect the exhibition “Shakespeare to Winehouse”.

As performing artists, we offer a physical and ephemeral experience of visiting the NPG and the themes within this prolific exhibition, inviting you to feel and think and be kinaesthetically engaged with the importance of people – figures in our world and across time that have shaped it, and the incredible ways artists have evolved to capture their essence.

Connecting Stories: Generations

25-26 June 2022 – 11am, 12:30pm & 1:30pm at the National Portrait Gallery

We invite you to feel, think and be engaged with the subjects in the exhibition, these influential people in our world and across time that have shaped it, and the incredible ways artists capture their essence.

Fame – Beckham. Diana. Sheeran. Campbell. Taylor and Jagger. What do they have in common? Fame. We explore their fame, individuality and success, in turn discovering our very own.

Power – “There are many types of power and these often intersect or reinforce one another.” The power of the community; connecting and supporting each other, giving each other strength, together being stronger and therefore more powerful.

Identity – Understanding our own identity, searching for others, finding them, connecting with them, valuing them for who they are, being ourselves in a multitude of others.

Love & Loss – Relationships, connections and separations. An image, a memory of those we have lost, a fragment of immortality.

Innovations – Art, a mirror of the sociological and technological context of the time. Innovation of dance, music and visual art, their changing style and form across time. Innovation can take us unexpected places in the evolving complexity and chaos that it can bring. Within the form and style of the art, there is always the subject – the person.

Self-portrait – Writing our own story, leaving a memory of that story for future generations, conscious that we are writing this story with other humans all around us. Our individual story in the giant web of humanity’s history.

Details

When: 24-25th June 2022 11am, 12:30pm & 1:30pm Where: National Portrait Gallery

Artists

Artistic Directors: Ruth Osborne, Alison Plevey & Cadi McCarthy Choreographers: Ruth Osborne, Cadi McCarthy, Alison Plevey, Craig Bary & Olivia Fyfe With dancers from QL2 Dance, the Australian Dance Party, Catapult Dance, QL2’s Quantum Leap ensemble and Catapult’s Flipside Project. Composer: Adam Ventoura