Errant (2024)
A performance for one or more dancers, Errant playfully disfigures the codes of public behaviour. The museum, ostensibly a beacon for creativity and experimentation, holds a strikingly narrow range of acceptable ways to be: you can stand looking at a piece of art, or you can sit on a bench looking at a piece of art, and that’s about it. Within this heavily guarded milieu, Errant introduces a body-at-odds—one that, through movement, gently probes the confines of the permissible. Working with a sensual responsiveness to a museum’s many spaces, Errant is driven by an improvisational practice that attempts to harness the work of paying attention as choreographic material in itself. How might our attention—and thus our body—inhabit the current moment, if the pressure to align with social definitions of coherent existence were released? The performers run, writhe, and crawl throughout the entire expanse of the museum: the gift shop, the lobby, the gallery, the common spaces.
Originally commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery for the three-month long ‘Aotearoa Contemporary’ exhibition, Errant is intended as an intervention into the usual locations and rhythms of performance in a museum context. Rather than a one-off event or a continual performance during the museum’s entire opening hours, Errant is performed at regular intervals over an extended period of time. Each performance lasts one hour, and roams throughout all available space. In this way, museum visitors often ‘encounter’ Errant rather than simply watch it: the work takes the building by surprise. For the iteration at Auckland Art Gallery, Errant was performed solo by three different performers over the course of three months, with each performer tackling the piece twice daily over the span of two weeks (resulting in six weeks and eighty four performances total).
Creation, performance: Amit Noy with Rose Tapsell and Olivia McGregor.
Costume design: 6x4 (Steven Junil Park)
Duration: 50 min, variable per iteration
Space: Museum space and/or alternative spaces
Premier: July 6th, 2024 at Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand.
Performances: July 6th-October 20th, 2024 at Auckland Art Gallery.
Full performance video available upon request.
Photos by Edith Amituanai