POESIS is a new choreographic work by Prue Lang created in collaboration with performers Tara Jade Samaya and Benjamin Hancock. Developed through the concept of counterpoint, the piece draws inspiration from biomimicry, physical intelligence, mythology, and philosophy.

At its core, POESIS explores the evolution of perception—how the sensory worlds of animals and humans shape our kinaesthetic experience and understanding of reality. Dance, as embodied intelligence, becomes a means to heighten perception and foster new encounters with the world.

Through a series of choreographic acts, the work investigates poesis—the act of bringing something new into being—foregrounding the unseen and amplifying how motion can deepen sensory awareness. The performance unfolds across shifting states of intensity and attention, ranging from subtle to fierce, and from intuitive to conceptual.

Grounded in the belief that expanding human perception toward that of other species is a vital act of ecological consciousness, POESIS invites audiences to experience a dynamic dialogue between movement, sensing, and environment.

https://vimeo.com/1116543522

Choreographer: Prue Lang
Performers: Tara Jade Samaya & Benjamin Hancock
Music: Chiara Costanza, Tchaikovsky, Recordings Whale Song
Lighting designer: Lisa Mibus
Costume Designs/Construction: Prue Lang, Andrew Treloar, Benjamin Hancock
Producer: Viviana Sacchero

Photos: Pippa Samaya

POESIS has been commissioned by The Keir Foundation, supported through a Studio Residency with The Australian Ballet, and presented by Dancehouse Melbourne. Studio support from Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc. and Dancehouse.

CASTILLO is new dance performance sparked by an artistic synergy between Prue Lang and Jana Castillo. The work explores the taxonomy of touch and texture through the lens of  choreography and neurodiversity.

CASTILLO danced and described via Pointe Shoes, Socks & Sneakers, exploring friction and texture to generate diverse and nuanced choreographic modalities. Each choreographic investigation is framed by a film, giving the spectator further insight into the complex art of dance making and embodiment. The film and live elements are interwoven to a score by renowned composer Chiara Costanza. CASTILLO is an innovative visual-musical journey, both poetic and virtuosic, that celebrates physical intelligence and difference and stimulates new perceptions of the dancing body.

Jana Castillo has an extra-ordinary physical intelligence and rigor due to her disability (Dystonia) and particular sensibilities due to Autism (ASD). Whilst these are invisible on stage, they are highly present in the rehearsal room and in daily life, making her a strong advocate for more inclusive dance practices. This work embraces her neurodiversity and difference, as we fully adapt the working process to her needs.

We also offer a public Q&A about the project should the venue be interested.

CASTILLO (Video Excerpt)

Concept & Direction: Prue Lang

Choreography: Prue Lang and Jana Castillo

Performer: Jana Castillo

Composer: Chiara Costanza

Lighting designer: Lisa Mibus

Video: Prue Lang, Pippa Samaya, Takeshi Kondo androids: Mathieu Briand

Producer: Alison Halit

Photos: Anne Moffat

This project is funded and supported by The Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Besen Family Foundation, Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance through the Makers program, Chunky Move, Dancehouse, Lucy Guerin Inc.

We offer a public Q&A about the project should the venue be interested. CASTILLO will also have a further iteration as a tactile-audiodescription for visually impaired audiences to more fully experience dance. This will be presented online with the textural elements sent to participants, in collaboration with Fayen d’Evie & Hillary Goidell.

18-20 January 2024 Theatre National de Chaillot, FRANCE

3-5 March 2022: Dancehouse Melbourne, AUSTRALIA.

15-17 June 2022:  Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis, FRANCE.

19-20 August 2022: InDANCE Sydney Dance Company, Sydney, AUSTRALIA

Imagine the present era is over. Some predict future humans will be aided, guided and minded over by artificial intelligences, super-capturing their lives, pointing them in useful directions, engineering their serendipity, personalising their remote presence, hapticsizing their intimacy and keeping them constantly switched on to networks. Others predict future humans will prize disconnection in the same way we seek out Wi-Fi, and the skills of deep human interaction, empathy, physical touch and the innate sensing of what other people are thinking or feeling will be the most valued in their societies.

This work places the body at the heart of this investigation.

Choreography: Prue Lang

Music: Chiara Costanza

Costume Design: Aleisa Jelbart

Lighting Design: Alexander Berlage

Performers: Ariella Casu, Holly Doyle, Izzac Carroll, Charmene Yap, Victor Zarallo

Photos: Pedro Grieg

Commissioned by SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY as part of New Breed 2018.

Co-presented by Carriageworks and Sydney Dance Company – with the generous support of The Balnaves Foundation.

This performance was created specifically for and took place within the dynamic graphic and textile installation of American artist Pae White. It was part of Accumulation – a choreographic takeover of the NGV Triennial in collaboration with Chunky Move, with new performance works by Prue Lang, Anouk Van Dyke, Antony Hamilton and Thomas E. Kelly.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2018.

Photos: Pippa Samaya

V I D E O – STELLAR PROJECT >

Choreography & concept: Prue Lang

Performers: Mikaela Carr, Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney, Harrison Ritchie-Jones

Dramaturgical reflection: Rebecca Hilton

Lighting design: Jenny Hector

Sound design: Mark Pederson

Costume design: Fozia Akalo

Producer: Alison Halit

Supported by Dancehouse, Creative Victoria, Australia Council for the Arts, Besen Foundation, Lucy Guerin Inc., City of Melbourne, Maximised Chunky Move, VCA

Photos: Pippa Samaya

Fayen d’Evie,  Prue Lang,  Troy McConnell,  Sophie Takách

Handovers + Translations was a collaboration between choreographer Prue Lang, visual artist Fayen d’Evie, sculptor Sophie Takách and blind artist Troy McConnell. Throughout October 2016, Gertrude Glasshouse Gallery in Melbourne was the site for a series of trans-sensory and inter-material translations, accumulating as an evolving haptic exhibition:

//audio-description transfigured as generative, vibrational practice / movement improvisations / hide(s) / work — works — work sites / articulated armatures / materials under tension / skin(s) / boundaries of encounters / resistance / responsiveness / contraction and release / transmission from body to material, from material to body, from material to material, from body to body / scores for encounters between bodies and material histories / taxonomies of touch / imprints of contact / distributed authorship / activation / elasticity / vibrational silence / private handovers / public handovers / removal / retreat / return / repeat //

Performer-explorers: Prue Lang, Louella Hogan, Benjamin Hancock, Harrison Ritchie-Jones

Photos: Pippa Samaya

Suppose we saw a leaf falling from a tree.

The event “the leaf falls on the ground” can be characterized by its spatial coordinates three in number (eg 54 ° N latitude, 20 ° E longitude and 120 m above sea level) and the time coordinate (for example 29 April, 2013 at 1 h 27 min 43 s). The event could also be characterised by its movement qualities (for example a suspended fall, a series of curved inscriptions in the air, a fluttering, touch and settling, or being caught by the earth). As architect and designer, Fredrick Kiesler pointed out in his manifesto for stage space that embraced three- dimensionality: “There is only one space element: motion.”  And if we map “motion”, it is against one axis representing space and one representing time.  Timeproject (France 2013) was an investigation of movement through the perception of time. Spaceproject (Australia 2015) is the investigation of movement through the perception of space. Both these works have at their heart the human body; the body as living receptor, measurer and generator of understandings of space and time.

Concept & Direction: Prue Lang

Choreography: Prue Lang in collaboration with the dancers.

Performers: Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney, Benjamin Hancock, James Batchelor

Texts: Lygia Clark, Brian Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari

Lighting: Danny Pettingill

Music: The cure, David Lang, Martial Solal

Sound edit: Maxwell Dowling

Supported by Arts Victoria, Besen Family Foundation, Dancehouse. Studio space at Chunky Move.

Presented at Dancehouse as part of Dance Massive Australia 2015.

Time is the unrecognized partner of the spatial and the intimate of the plastic. If there were only one element in the space it would be motion. And if we map “motion”, one axis represents space and the other represents time.

Since the invention of the mechanization of time and the consequent regulation of personal time, we operate on a chronometric time. This mechanical evaluation of time is based on the principle that time is a reflection of change – and essentially physical change. Whether this change be seasonal, the aging of a body or the revolution of a mechanized object, the main feature of this model is that time is quantifiable. Yet despite the synchronicity and linearity of time, its perception is wholly subjective and intangible. Theatre remains distinct in its shared time relationship between the audience and the performer. The complexity of the performer and the performance in time is specific to theatre, attainable because the truth of the situation – that a performance is occurring in the now – underlines all time frames other than ‘now’ as fictive; and as fictions they are malleable. This malleability of time, through a conscious process of examining the time relationship to action, is the departure point for this choreographic work.

Parallel to this, the performance provides an opportunity for the research and development of a prototype of “piezoelectric ” shoes in which the energy of the dancers can be harvested to produce energy. This project is accompanied by a ‘Green rider”, both for the theater and for the company, created in collaboration with Imagine 2020 Art and Climate change.

Conception, mise en scène Prue Lang

Chorégraphie Prue Lang en collaboration avec Douglas Bateman, Norbert Pape, Asha Thomas, Nina Vallon

Avec Douglas Bateman, Norbert Pape, Asha Thomas, Nina Vallon

Lumières Gilles Gentner

Prototype des chaussures récupération d’énergie Graffiti Research Lab

Coproduction Association PLANT / CDC Réseau / Festival Faits d’hiver / Théâtre National de Chaillot /

Avec le soutien du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Ile-de-France / Fondation d’Art Oxylane

© Hillary Goidell

We live without having to know that it requires a heart, organs, a whole labyrinth of tubes and wires, a whole living equipment of retorts and filters, by which an unending exchange can take place within us, between all the types of matter and all the forms of energy –from the atom to the cell, and from the cell to the visible and tangible masses in our body. Paul Valéry, Variété V

‘Honarary mention’ award in the PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA -Hybrid Art 2012

http://www.paris-art.com/spectacle-danse-contemporaine/un-reseau-translucide/lang-prue/7545.html

L’intégration des expérimentations écologiques dans un spectacle de danse -Table ronde :

1er décembre 2011, 18H00 – 19H30 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris

Investigating human activity as a renewable source of energy and re-thinking habitual modes of theatre production, Un reseau Translucide is an autonomous performance that runs 100% on its own energy. In collaboration with performers Nina Vallon and Vanessa Le Mat, and engineer-inventors Charles Goyard and Amanda Parkes, Un reseau Translucide is a work that poses the question ‘how could we make performances for the future?’ Developing a choreographic system in which the performers simultaneously generate the electricity, the work examines the relationship between the body and its environment, while opening up a dialogue on sustainable development in artistic practice.

Mains d’oeuvres, Saint-Ouen 30 September & 1 October 2011

Festival Faits d’hiver, Paris 21 & 22 January 2011

Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf 29 & 30 January 2011

Co-production: Festival Faits d’hiver, Tanzhaus NRW, PLANT
Co-realisation: Mains d’Oeuvres.
Supported by Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – DRAC Ile de France, Dicream, Adami. Created in residence at Mains d’Œuvres. Studios lent by CND and Micadanses.

Costume design and engineering: Amanda Parkes/ MIT Media Lab

Costume construction by Aaron Crosby.

Created for the MichaelDouglas Kollektiv as part of their ‘One week stand’ series, Timepiece is a response to the collective’s request to create a work in a relatively short timeframe (7days). In order to achieve this Lang chose to create a model, which encompassed autonomy and order whilst focusing on the specificities of the INSTANTANEOUS. Dividing the stage in two parts: the time taken by a particular action determined the duration and content of a simultaneously performed choreographic counteraction. Although the two events were aurally and conceptually inseparable, the spectator could visually bounce between them and follow the ever-evolving engagements that were taking place.

Wind moves horizontally, while a draft moves vertically.

If these were parameters for a game, what would be the inherent logic that could be experienced or played out? If the mind fluctuates between discovery and calculation in order to construct a pathway through a larger network, what are the consequences of invisibility? Proliferating from a specifically designed dance floor by Mary Moore, Rubicon is choreographic manifestation of a game system– one in which strategy, meandering, navigation, organisation and manipulation play inside a set of shifting coordinates.

Space Theatre – Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 2010

Co-production: Leigh Warren & Dancers, Adelaide Festival and the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Pivot(al) program

30 min
10m x 10m
4 x performers

Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt GERMANY 2007
Tanz performance köln, Cologne GERMANY 2007

Co-production : Tanz performance köln, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Cercle Rouge France Supported by: NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ aus Mitteln des Tanzplans Deutschland der Kulturstiftung des Bundes. With residency support from Centre National de la Danse – Paris.

60 minutes
Site-specific
100 x performers

Turbine Hall – TATE Modern, London U.K. 2007

Production : The Tate Modern UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2007 U.K.

20 / 20 / 20 minutes
7m x 9m
1 x performer

Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt GERMANY 2006
Context Festival - Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin GERMANY 2007

Co-production : Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt, Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin.
Supported by : Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V., Amt für Wissenschaft und Kunst Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Istituto Italiano di Cultura Frankfurt am Main.

Lang chose to collaborate with French artist Mathieu Briand –renowned for his fine art in sensory perception- on this work for the Festival Temps d’Images in Paris. Inspired by Duchamp’s Infrathin they together developed a unique sensorial environment to enhance and intensify the spectator’s perception of Dance. The audience are given protective clothing suits and asked to experience the performance barefoot. On entering the performance space, feet plunge into five tonnes of talcum powder and a green laser floods and slices the space, creating an optical illusion of being immersed in water. As Kristin Swiat and Luis Rodriguez begin their duet, sound drifts through the space and the choreography becomes a crystallized skin generating waves of fine talc that float in and out of the light. The notion of Infrathin is one of focus and the spectator simultaneously resolves the dancing bodies with his/her own proprioceptive contact with the talc. The mesmerizing nexus of image, movement and sensation, brings an entirely new way of perceiving and situating oneself in contemporary dance.

30 minutes
10m x 7m
2 x performers

Festival Temps d’Images ARTE/ La ferme du buisson, Paris FRANCE 2005
Transart festival, Bolzano ITALY 2006
ARTE tracks – La fleur de peau et Prue Lang avec Mathieu Briand FRANCE 2006

Co-production : La ferme du Buisson –Scene nationale de Marne-la-Vallee / ARTE, Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf

6 minutes
Short film
within Frankfurt Dance Cuts

ARTE Televison FRANCE / GERMANY 2005,
Dance on camera festival, New York U.S A. 2005
Dance screen Bristol U.K. 2005
Festival Temps d’image Rome ITALY 2005
Reeldance International Dance on Screen festival, Sydney AUSTRALIA 2006
Cinedans Festival, Amsterdam HOLLAND 2006
Festival di palazzo venezia, Rome ITALY 2006

Produktion: Tag/Traum Köln, Auftragsproduktion für ZDF/ARTE

At the invitation of Klapstuk #12 Festival, Episode collaborated with Berlin laptop musician Christian Kleine to create and perform The Kleine episode. Fourty-four different smurfs were placed on the stage and acted as an interface between the dancers and the musician. Together they developed a real-time performance system in which the displacement of smurfs and their particular qualities triggered changes in light, sound and physicality, enabling them to simutaneously create and manipulate the theatrical dynamics of the space.

40 minutes
10m x 8m
4 x performers

Klapstuk #12 festival, Leuven BELGIUM 2005

Co-production : STUK Leuven, Belgium and the EPISODE collective

In collaboration with video artist Cindy Lee and performers Vanessa Le Mat, Roberta Mosca, Krisha Swiat and Mario Zambrano, Fiftyfourville is a choreographic work that questions the processes of living and connecting that inhabit the way we construct and view the world around us. Following on from Infinite Temporal Series, which was inspired by the labyrinth as a literary motif to explore narrative structures, Fiftyfourville relates the concept of the labyrinth to that of the Deleuzian rhizome. The labyrinth is defined both by the path that leads one into the centre and the path that leads one astray. In contrast to centred systems with hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths, the rhizome is an acentred, non-hierarchical system, devoid of formal organisation and defined solely by a circulation of states. Reflecting on the film Alphaville –Godard’s dystopian universe in which a central automaton dictates all individual orientation, Lang uses these three spatio-temporal models to investigate the production of physical language, choreographic structure and modes of perception.

56 min
10m x 10m
4 x performers

Hebbel-am-ufer (HAU 3) Berlin, GERMANY 2004
Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf GERMANY 2005
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt GERMANY 2004
Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis Paris FRANCE 2005
Kalamata International Dance Festival, GREECE 2005

Supported by: STUK kunstencentrum Leuven, Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V aus den Mitteln der Beauftragten des Bundes für Kultur und Medien

30 min
20m x 6m
9 x performers

Bockenheimer Depot /TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2003
Klapstuk Festival #11 Leuven BELGIUM 2003
Tanzplattform Deutschland, Düsseldorf GERMANY 2004
Pelerinages Festival Weimar GERMANY 2004
Festival Mettre-en-Scene, Rennes FRANCE 2004
Les Halles de Schaerbeek Brussels BELGIUM 2005
Chunky Move performance space, Melbourne AUSTRALIA 2005

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer depot, Kunstfest Weimar

In collaboration with performers – Ayman Harper, Charlie Hubner, David Kern, Vanessa Le Mat and Roberta Mosca -The How Episode was created after an invitation from Berlin’s CONTEXT festival whose theme in 2004 was « authorship ». Episode began the process by asking each performer to buy a fortune cookie on a specific day and noted the recollections of this event. The network of individual trajectories and experiences very quickly brought up issues of orientation, expectation, interpretation and translation, from which physical and linguistic parameters were developed for the performance system. Members of the audience were invited to set the dance in motion by responding to questions that subsequently fed into the real-time system. The translation from one language to another, from text into movement, and from movement into language, generated a stream of transforming compositions, facilitating the articulation of a collective performance system.

50 minutes
10m x 8m
8 x performers

Hebbel-am-ufer (HAU 3) Berlin GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin and the EPISODE collective

5 minutes
Short film

Bockenheimer Depot/TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer depot Frankfurt

8 minutes (looped)
4m x 4m

Bockenheimer Depot/ Das TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2003
Pelerinages Festival, Weimar GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt

The Blueprint episode was the first site-specific commission for the collective. Using a 20 metre space in the Frankfurt Neue Börse, the collective defined an imaginary architecture to which they applied rules of chance to a series of numbered spaces. The activation and function of particular spaces changed according to the previous interaction, enabling a real-time choreographic system by which the performers could produce an unforeseeable structure.

30 minutes
20m x 4m
8 x performers

Neue Börse, Frankfurt a.m. GERMANY 2003

Co-production : Frankfurter Kultur Komitee / Eurex Neue Börse Frankfurt and the EPISODE collective

30 min
6m x 4m
5 x performers

Bockenheimer Depot/ Das TAT, Frankfurt GERMANY 2002

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt

Created for the Frankfurt Ballett, this duet examines the process inherent in one’s relationship to oneself through the reflection of what is visible. Often used as a self-development tool in dance, the continuous use of a mirror puts us into the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to the images of ourselves. The distinction between analysing the visual stimuli reflected back at oneself and analysing one’s physical expression through an inherent sensory awareness, creates a reference from which the dancer crafts his/her own art form. In this performance, a video projected onto and beyond the performers, creates a space in which the relationship to the self and the other, is in constant tension with the shifting reflection. The fluidly constructed visual layers and hypnotic physicality resonate in a powerful state of performance.

30 min
4m x 4m
2 x performers

Co-production : Ballett Frankfurt -Das TAT/ Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt