Cosmopolitan Folk Dance

the dancers mission:

1. make the space as you need it (music, lights, temperature etc) and dance for pleasure/get lost in the dance for the duration of 1 song.

2. as soon as you can name what you’re doing as a move/style/genre, change it. (but you are allowed to slip back into it, this is not a search for “pure” or “authentic” movement, this is a dance for the pleasure of dancing.

 

the viewers instruction:

stand surrounding the dancer. the dancer is dancing only in response to pleasure and enjoyment. they will dance for 1 song.

 

the artist’s intention:

in a world where exposure to dancing (it’s generation and performance) can be constant and global due to travel and digital communications, perhaps there is a form of dance that is not born of or owned by a people of a single geographic location but generated directly out of global/viral culture. A cosmopolitan folk dance that can fill the void of the “Traditional Dance” that many of us never learnt.

(When a group takes on this question it looks like -> I Learnt My Cultural Dance From YouTube  )

 

It has so far been presented at YumChat as part of BrisAsia Festival 2017 and BareBones which was a part of SuperCell Dance Festival on the Gold Coast.

Matt has been invited to bring this project to the South Borneo Arts Festival in November of 2018 and is seeking funding to cover transport.

you can listen to a conversation with YumLab facilitator River Lin about this stage of Matt’s project at Wombat Radio