– WORLD PREMIERE –

Atlanta Eke has built a reputation as one of Australia’s most provocative choreographers with a radical approach to tackling the complex anxieties of our technologically laden world. The Tennis Piece is a dance performance and multimedia installation that reimagines the Tennis Court as a time machine, performed by 4 dancers, 4 tennis ball machines, 400 tennis balls, and a robotic lute at the Collingwood Town Hall. Eke, together with her dancers, travel back to 20 June 1789 where the members of the French Third Estate congregated in the city of Versailles and took the Tennis Court Oath, a pivotal event in the French Revolution.

What unfolds is a choreographic de-construction of Renaissance dance; the collapse of organised social court dances; and the unleashing of an explosive new process, beyond human agency. Eke contemplates the confines of ‘supreme cosmic intelligence’ through a new choreographic modality that reorganizes the known into the deeply unrecognizable.

Dancing in the face of obsolescence, against an irrational and intensifying flow of 400 tennis balls and 4 self-feeding tennis ball machines, The Tennis Piece becomes a container for positive feedback loops — ever rapidly approaching an unthinkable limit that was forever and always already there.

The Tennis Piece will be performed as an installation and a series of performed ‘live trailers’ at Gertrude Contemporary from 8 February - 23 March.

Presented by Dancehouse as part of Dance Massive 2019