Surface Area Dance Theatre The mud formed a finger, pointed / Raft

'The Mud Formed A Finger, Pointed' explores creation myth and Messy Play, while 'Raft' is a navigation of self via astrology. By Matthew De Kersaint Graudeau, Ben Jeans Houghton, Nicole Vivien Watson.

'The Mud Formed A Finger, Pointed' offers a study of the human body as an uncanny object that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, body and material, depicting an object becoming human, a human becoming an object and the protean states between.

Nicole Vivien Watson emerges from an industrial bucket, her body covered in dripping, viscous corn starch. The work embodies a contemporary creation myth that melds object and subject, abject and sacred, non-human and human. By invoking the narrative imagery of creation myths where humans are formed from the earth, within the aesthetic of the fetish Messy Play and through the language of Butoh, the performance links our understandings of the contemporary body and our imaginings of a primordial past.

'Raft' explores inner and outer landscapes, through a Nicole's choreographed mapping and navigation of the solar system and the self performed on a sculptural Zodiac stage. Presenting a dialogue between the microcosm and the macrocosm, mapping the relationships between distant stars, the present individual and the planets, in an exploration and interogation of the esoteric and exoteric aspects of self.

'Raft' draws inspiration from: 'The Archaic Revival' - the invigoration of principles and practices whose efficacy was mislaid during the divorce of science and spirituality. 'Alchemical Practice' - the ritual arrangement of persons and symbols in the physical world to create a narrative dialogue that changes the conceptual and emotional world within us. 'Self exploration' - the quest to know oneself via a navigation of our emotional and historical experience of being.