Festival off Avignon
Two of our PRG members, Rachel Rimmer-Piekarczyk and Kevin Egan, are presenting two shows (Negative Space and A String Section) at the prestigious Festival off Avignon from 5th-16th July.
A String Section– A radical and fascinating performance, straddling the line between dance, visual theatre, and live installation. Five women, dressed in black, sit on five chairs. Armed with saws, they engage in a meticulous, methodical, poetic, and absurd choreography: sawing the legs off their own chairs, slowly, inexorably, until they fall.
The simple gesture becomes a powerful ritual. Each movement, each sound of the blade on the wood, each burst of imbalance composes a score of tension, humour and raw beauty. The piece plays with gravity- physical, but also symbolic. It questions resistance, self-sabotage, elegance in struggle, and fragile dignity in the face of impending collapse.
Created by Leen Dewilde for Reckless Sleepers, its visual power and conceptual simplicity make it in immediately readable yet profoundly striking work that leaves a lasting impression.
Negative Space– A play without words, where the scenery collapses, love explodes, and humour cuts through.
To begin, Reckless Sleepers (the theatre company these two PRG members are a part of) built a room-sized wooden frame and lined it with plasterboard. For several weeks they started smashing it up, smashing it down, then piecing together the fragments of their own destruction. The result is this show, Negative Space. From a blank architectural canvas, something fantastical emerges. It’s a love story. It’s a slapstick comedy. It’s slasher, action, melodrama…and not a single word is spoken. Soon different possible stories are spiralling around, hurtling towards an ending.
