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Drop Dead Gorgeous

Vincent Dance Theatre / Dada Von Bzdulow Theatre (Poland)

2001, 75 mins

'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting' Milan Kundera

Drop Dead Gorgeous is a piece for six dancers, performed on a tonne and a half of slate stone. The piece explores how pain acts as an instrument for shifting consciousness, how doubt acts as a fuel for testing long held assumptions. Taking place in a stark and broken landscape, bombed out by men with guns, missiles, bombs and hate, six people move, talk, dance, attack, tell tales, act out their worst nightmares, hide in the shadows and share secrets and lies.

Drop Dead Gorgeous was created in the Wybrzeze Theatre, Gdansk, Poland and at Yorkshire Dance, Leeds, with a production week at Arnolfini, Bristol. Drop Dead Gorgeous was commissioned by Arnolfini Live and Yorkshire Dance and funded by Sheffield City Arts, City of Gdansk, Zak Club Gdansk, The British Council, Yorkshire Arts and Arts Council England. This work is dedicated to Lea Parkinson, Henryk Tomaszewski, Terry Weltner and Andrea.

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Drop Dead Gorgeous takes place in a precarious, harsh and shifting landscape of dust and stones. Made in Poland and England over the summer of 2001, we were busy staging our own multiple deaths when time froze for a day, and the dramatic events in America overtook our imaginations. 11.09.2001. A day the earth stood still.

Our exploration of ‘the demolition of a man’, (as described by Primo Levi in If This Is A Man), researched within our creative process and placed historically in time, seemed suddenly overshadowed by more contemporary, real events. Overwhelmed by a new reality of war and death, with our subject matter brought up to date with terrifying poignancy, we shared a moment in time that we would never be able to forget. Our efforts to comment on the subject seemed puny, dangerous, tasteless, even.

Where to draw the line? How to have something to say that isn’t overstated, sentimental or melodramatic, but which stays truthful to our thoughts, feelings and personal experiences? How to allude to the death and destruction we live with, without recreating images that should never be resurrected? In Greek tragedy, the worst moments are always unseen, off stage (‘obscene’). So, what to show? What to hide behind the wall? As our ability to play in the current climate became more loaded, so the act of performance becomes more hazardous - physically risky and emotionally confusing. How to translate the information? How to maintain humour and find something to believe in, in this fragmented and mind-blowing moment in history?

Drop Dead Gorgeous was half formed when the planes flew over New York. But now, as we step outside the studio and into the ‘real’ world with our work, there is a wild wind blowing through this city.

Charlotte Vincent 2001

Directed by Charlotte Vincent
Composed by John Avery
Set Design Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design James Harrison
Devised and Performed by TC Howard, Peter Shenton, Aurora Lubos, Patrycja Kujawska, Leszek Bzdyl, Charlotte Vincent

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