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Nerve 9 goes national

In May 2001, Tess De Quincey’s Nerve 9 premiered at Performance Space. A multilayered, intensive collaboration with visual artist Deborah Petrovich, poet/performer Amanda Stewart and writer/new media artist Francesca da Rimini, Nerve 9 was hypnotic, gloriously abstract and curiously sensual. Solo dancer/choreographer De Quincey moved as if on a different plane to audience mortals, her elliptical trajectory intersecting with projected images and texts and aural worlds. Nerve 9 is making a very welcome return with a national tour through the innovative Mobile States program.

In her review for RealTime, Eleanor Brickhill wrote: “Nerve 9 is hybrid in essence…creating an intellectual arena within which all its ideas can grow and mingle. It synthesises some quite rarefied elements—Stewart’s shimmering sonic and visual poetry and De Quincey’s enduringly watchable portraits of attenuated human frailty. The different sounds (both text and soundscapes) and movement are entwined, as if De Quincey’s body can be shot through with those textures, human and electronic, structured and hanging on shafts or webs of sound, animated sometimes entirely by those vibrations (RT 44, p35, “Nerve 9: a body called flesh”).

Tess de Quincey is a unique performer. Eleanor Brickhill wrote, “She seems to work with ideas, particularly internalised and embodied, rather than with overt and consciously planned movement. It’s possible to see a physical narrative unfolding through the work—the flowering of a peculiarly acute register of human sensibility, the medium through which a person experiences the world.”

The tour of Nerve 9 presents a rare opportunity for audiences intrigued by contemporary performance and dance to witness a seamless integration of movement, image, text and sound in the work of these 4 leading artists. RT

Tess De Quincey, Nerve 9, PICA, Performance Space, Salamanca Arts Centre, Arts House (North Melbourne Town Hall), Brisbane Powerhouse, Darwin Entertainment Centre, Sept 28-Nov 23 (see advertisement for venue dates)

RealTime issue #68 Aug-Sept 2005 pg. 39

© RealTime; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net

1 August 2005