Past Residents Sarah Aiken
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Sarah Aiken, Make Your Life Count (production image- live performance) 2022, Photo by Tiffany Garvie
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Sarah Aiken CUTS video still 2021
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Sarah Aiken, Make Your Life Count (production image- live performance) 2022, Photo by Tiffany Garvie
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Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen/Deep Soulful Sweats. Equinox (production image) Keeln O'Hehir
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Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen/Deep Soulful Sweats. What Am I Supposed To Do? Development image. Gregory Lorenzutti
SARAH AIKEN is a performer, teacher and choreographer whose collaborative and solo work pursues an ongoing interest in how & what we value, using dichotomies & clashes to create poignancy through absurdity, wedding technology and corporality – creating assemblages greater than their parts. Her work shifts in form but is deeply bedded in choreographic, dancerly thinking, while drawing from and collaborating with, object, image, text/script, sound and technology. Engaging rigorously with participation, scale, waste and image, she leans into theatrical illusions and employs a reckless formalism; collaging and recycling content, structure and objects to consider theatricality, materiality and how we come together.
I’m working on choreographies for screen, collaging movement and collected video footage, finding unlikely connections to form new bodies and multi-form choreographies. The work uses scale to disrupt assumed hierarchies – considering the body as an assemblage, as a landscape for microscopic life, as singular, as a multitude, as a tool for change, both destructive and generative, and as temporary – tracing imagined histories of our matter. Imagining surreal bodies- contaminated by each cells previous encounters, revealing indeterminate and multidirectional histories and looking for ways to re-blur the borders drawn around ‘human’ and ‘nature’, ‘self’ and ‘other’.
Sarah Aiken’s residency is realised with support from The Australia Council for the Arts.