Live Collision International Festival 2025

Chris O'Rourke
5 days ago
4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Tomorrowisnowtodayisyesterday by Sung Im Her. Image, Sung Im Her

Post Dramatic Theatrical Performance refers to a particular approach to theatre where dramatic conventions (character, conflict, proscenium staging) are subverted or ignored. Instead, alternate artistic conventions - dance, cinema, music, multi-media - are merged, or subverted, in interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary collaborations foregrounding presence and performance over text. Like sub-genres of metal and hip hop, this working definition distinguishes Post-Dramatic Theatrical Performances from other, similar art forms such as Performance Art. Definition proving vital given Post Dramatic Theatrical Performance is often dismissed as Performance Art's poor relation. A perception Live Collision International Festival 2025 aims to challenge. Viewing art and theatre as ongoing, ever evolving concerns, Live Collision International Festival, now in its thirteenth year, aspires, in the words of founding festival director and current curator, Lynnette Moran, to deliver “performance as transformation rather than commentary.” Challenging, in the process, the audience's position as passive spectators.

Like all great festivals Live Collision International Festival 2025 brings experienced veterans and fledgling artists together. Evident in two performances whose foundations lie in dance. Beginning with young, black, Irish artist Ghaliah Conroy. A rising star whose debut, Sunken Works/Who Makes The Rules? displays impressive promise coupled with growing pains. Conroy bravely jumping into the shark infested, multi-disciplinary deep end in attempting to explore how we look via movement and image. Interrogating the oft forgotten practice of the Human Zoo, where black people were historically displayed in cages like animals for perusal by a white audience. The relationship between body, space, seeing and subjectivity interrogated as cultural and social practices. The misrepresentation of black identity challenged as Conroy repositions how and what we see.

Yet it falls foul to some basic issues. Predicated on seeing, the body struggles to be visible, literally; presented as a fleshless, faceless, formless mass dancing in the dark on a black box against a black back drop, dressed in black from head to toe, including a hood and black mask, illuminated only by a scratch of overhead light. The performative forest getting lost in the theoretical trees. Beginning with a slow, ponderous sequence lying on a large black box, hands supporting hips, legs in the air weaving slow patterns like a bicycle exercise, or else leaning on one arm in repose. The body reduced to articulating hands and muscular calves glimpsed when not subsumed in shadow, with front and back made interchangeable courtesy of some clever costuming.

*Sunken Works/Who Makes The Rules by Ghaliah Conroy. Image uncredited.*

Written text provides grounding for the next sequence as a muffled recording of Maya Angelou reciting The Mask risks reducing the physical to the verbal. The body made compliant, with movement offering near mimetic representation of the text. Followed by a camera sequence offering an alternate frame. Conroy’s eye, watching us, captured through its mask by the camera, undermined by her presence; the eye looking at us from the screen always leading back to the performer looking at the camera. Conroy’s true strength revealed in a final, powerful dance sequence. Short, snapping, fluid movements, marginally clearer in the light from the screen, juxtaposed against flashing, provocative images. Images coming a distant second to the physical body as a site of information and transformation. Conroy proving a visceral conduit, despite carrying an injury which she bravely pushed through. If the injury impacted on choreography it was impossible to know given Conroy exhibited rage, pain, distress and release so powerfully it risked everything else looking forced.

Switching to more experienced performers, Tomorrowisnowtodayisyesterday (TiNTiY) by South Korean artist Sung Im Her leans unashamedly into dance as two become one in a divine entanglement exploring the impact of social media. A floor routine in which two dancers, a radiant Martha Passakopoulou and a superb Sung Im Her in peroxide blonde wigs and black masks wrestle, jujitsu style, around the space opens up into comic intrigue. Costumes shed for something a little easier to move in facilitating the beginning of a durational sequence as the body is pushed to its physical limits. If movement patterns change, the patterning remains the same. A vocal ingredient, be it a grunt or recited verse, is overlaid with a rhythmic music phrase as a recurring pattern of movements is explored. Arms flailing high and wide, shuffling like a windup toy, jumps, thrusts, punches and poses facilitating organic moments of synchronicity evolving from the chaos. Yet (TiNTiY) is ever mindful of the body in performance. Counting movements, water breaks, pauses for dancers to catch their breath offering more than just playful diversion. Like the exaggerated mime in learning how to create a Tik Tok story, humour is a joyous by product of deeper, smarter interrogations. Its forty joyous minutes of energised, exhausting delight forever embedded in the body which embodies everything.

This gives barely a hint of what Live Collision International Festival 2025 has to offer, it being one of the most genuinely innovative festivals. Those looking to understand more about Post Dramatic Theatrical Performance should avail of Hans-Theis Lehmann’s seminal worku Postdramatic Theatre. Or better still, just take yourself along to a show. Whether it's veterans or rising stars, Live Collision International Festival 2025 is guaranteed to leave you intrigued, curious and wanting more.