KMA

61.8% Water (working title) will be a new large-scale KMA work for 2010. It will be the world’s first ever ballet designed, choreographed and composed entirely for pedestrian performers.

Working with a leading contemporary composer, KMA will ‘choreograph’ a specially commissioned ballet score to create an extraordinary world premiere; a dance-work designed to be performed in the centre of urban environments where both dancers and audience are formed entirely from passers-by (both citizens and tourists) and where every performance is entirely unique.

61.8% Water will be made in association with the English National Ballet  and devised alongside the re-workings of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that ENB are developing for the Shanghai World Expo2010. Coincidentally KMA’s own work Flock (Trafalgar Square, 2007) was also based on Swan Lake.

Whilst 61.8% Water will borrow themes from the original ballet it will be an abstract contemporary re-working based on the idea of water as something that connects all of us; both globally (traversing oceans) and individually (for all our differences all humans are essentially two-thirds water).

As with all KMA’s work there will be no vocal or textual element. Participants simply respond to the choreographed light and sound. The resulting social engagements reaffirm the urban community through embodied, rather than verbal, discourse.

KMA became the first contemporary artists to be commissioned to create a new work for the National Railway Museum. Taking inspiration from the museum and its collection, they created a large LED sculptural interpretation of the relationship between time and distance, and how it affects the journeys we make and the people we meet.

Projected light and thermal-imaging technology were used to create jaw-dropping interactive playing arenas in which human movement triggered spectacular light effects. The games took place simultaneously in three North East UK locations; Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. Each area competed against the others in this world-first event.

The games were set out of doors, in large urban spaces, with no pre-prepared participants. The scale of the arenas created a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which they were placed, drawing audiences to them, quite often by chance as people went about their daily lives. Curiosity drew people in, but it was the intelligence of the language within these games which held the public attention and engaged them in problem solving, play and social engagement.

By manipulating time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between participant and audience, KMA’s work is opening up vast new environments in which art and audiences meet equally on each other’s terms.

Some video footage from Great Street Games is available here

5circles is a radical, imaginative, and beautiful global project that aims to fundamentally transform the relationship between artist, performer and spectator in urban public art.

Developed from principles established by KMA, 5circles builds on their successful public interactive light works in a new collaboration with Pilot Theatre to celebrate 2012. An inaugural performance was held in York in October 2009.

Strange Attractors (The Anatomy of Dr Tulp) opened in Liverpool in September as part of the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices festival.

The piece is an exploration of relationships and spaces, using the audience as the subject matter, creating an impromptu choreography formed as a response to the natural enquiry and playfulness of the public.

There’s more information and some video from the opening night here.

To Be Straight with You is a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality. It incorporates dance, text, documentary, film and animated projections to create a unique piece of theatre.

KMA worked closely with Lloyd Newson and the entire DV8 cast and crew throughout the show’s devising period. This resulted in a series of scenes in which the projected video and the performers’ movements are coordinated, generating some highly original and arresting theatrical imagery.

You can read more about the show, and read some press reactions here