Human Abstract
Director and Choreographer Lucas Jervies
Music Adam Ster
Design Tiffany Carbonneau, Andrew Cozzens, Ezra Kellerman
Light Design Michael Ford
Photography Sam English
Human Abstract is a work about love, abandon and isolation.
The creative team took inspiration from numerous sources; Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, William Blake’s The Human Abstract and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Cocteau’s play explores distortion, desperation and suicide. Blake’s poem explores virtue and time. And, Shakespeare’s tragedy needs no explanation.
To deepen your experience, I would like to expose how the dancers and I created the classical based movement you're about to see. With each of my creations I bring a process that encourages a keener awareness of both mind and body, forcing the artist to be an active thinker through performance. This synergy between the emotional and physical, the internal and external, helps discover psychological objectives through physical states of being. Exploring the subjective and objective simultaneously creates conflict in choreography that is restless but refreshing. As a counter point we created mandala inspired physical sequences. Mandala patterns are used in meditation to facilitate a reorientation, connection or abstraction. Tibetan monks create mandala with dust of precious stones and once completed they wash it all away, demonstrating the fragility and deception of physical form.
A painful coming of age story is embedded in this production’s physical thesis and persistent, sexy original soundtrack by the wonderful Adam Ster. It is about finding one’s self, finding love, and then losing both. - Lucas Jervies