ABSTRACT
Dream-work (2009–2014) was the sixteenth performance work made by Bodies in Flight, a U.K.-based performance company formed in 1990 by choreographer Sara Giddens and writer Simon Jones. Over all these works, our abiding concern has been to reexamine and reinvigorate the fundamental relationship in performance between bodies and discursive practices, be they choreographic, musical, sonic, verbal, or visual. We call this relationship the encounter between flesh and text, occasioned in the contingent and dynamic space and time of the performance-event itself by the face-to-face encounter between performer and audience member. In order to understand better the plenitude of this ephemeral encounter, we have figured it as a series of duets between ourselves and collaborators working across skill sets beyond choreography and writing, each practice in effect having its own language and structure, incapable of translation into or equivalence with any other, each working alongside each other in the performance-event itself, as this writing works alongside our current practice.
