KUDERA + MPEARSONATER is an ongoing collaboration between garment designer and textile artist Alena Kudera + dancer and performance maker Mary Pearson.
What Have We Become?
Their performance research project, dialogue and collaboration began as a search for an embodied and felt response to environmental crisis.
By ‘wearing the consequences’ of global consumer capitalism, we create a kind of shadow play. We invite audiences to enter a space of contemplation and imagination, where we can face difficult truths, dream future possibilities and remember alternative pasts.
KUDERA made two collections of garments and accessories from single use plastics, fast fashion, and other materials destined for the landfill. These are designed to give immersive, sensory experiences to dancers who improvise. They are visually mesmerizing, sculptural, and grotesque yet seductive. We become mythical sentient beings, animating inanimate bodies that can be shed or discarded.
Between 2018-24, MPEARSONATER researched and performed with many dancer collaborators.
Photo: Alena Kudera Image: Mary Pearson
Image: Laura Doehler in theatre wearing head mask of latex gloves, woven yellow plastic and blue ties, bare arm in front of projection of her image in forest
Image: Mary Pearson, wearing 'Latex Swan' close up of dancing at water's edge on Dorset coast
Image: Mary Pearson, wearing plastic shopping bags and food wrappers, styrofoam and plastic balls, blue ties, in sand by jagged rocks on Welsh coastline
Image: Laura Doehler in theatre wearing head mask of latex gloves, woven yellow plastic and blue ties, bare arm in front of projection of her image in forest
Episode i
2019
may 27th- June 1st, 2019
Filming in mature growth forest, Llandysul, Wales.
june 24-29th, 2019
Filming on Jurassic heritage coastline, Dorset, UK.
Sept 23- October 4th
Residencies in LJMU Sudley Theatre, and Unity Theatre, Liverpool
Sept 23, 2019 ‘rough cuts’ screening of video shorts at Metal Culture
Oct 4, 2019 work-in-progress performance installation at Unity Theatre
2020
August 31st - September 12th, 2020
Ponderosa Dance, Stolzenhagen, Germany.
Residency culminating in site-specific outdoor performance.
What have we become?
Ensnared by our own disposable by-products.
As if a plastic bag could kill me, I would eat myself to death, suffocate in bliss, not notice we were dying we were experiencing so much pleasure.
As if my body needed reminding it was there, as if otherwise I would float away.
As if nobody cared, as if anybody cared, as if there is no time to care.
As if care equals stuff.