PILE OF BONES

Role: Set and Costume Designer

Choreographer: Stephanie Lake

Composer: Robin Fox

Set & Costume Designer: XaSha Chua-Huggins

Lighting Designer: Aden Gale

Sound Designer/Technical Manager: Oliver Pool

Dancers: VCA Dance Company of 2020

Pile of Bones explores lifecycles, including desires, behaviours and relationships. This work focuses on the absurdity of the human experience and our inevitable destiny as a lifeless pile of bones. The full performance is approximately 10 minutes long, and divided into three main sections:

1.Chair Section, this examines human behaviour

2.Posted-Note Section, which explores vulnerability
and being unprotected

3.Unison Section, portrays this mechanical
routine of life

My design communicates different aspects of life, our experience of vulnerability, relationships and routine. I also hope to convey this state of pending mortality and question what life truly is. My set design utilises clean geometric forms to portray the man-made landscape. In front of a large white curtain are 4 white chairs. My set design aims to explore an aspect of human desire, our need to create and produce within society.

The dance scrutinizes on behaviour, routine and the inner soul. My costume design emulates the human skeleton in a mechanical form. The use of cogs and wheels communicates life's predictable function, manner, allocated lifespan and skills. The design speculates life’s purpose with a reminder of life’s imminent end by reducing the body of life to an inanimate mechanism in order to question what separates us and the inanimate. This imminent end is furthered by the body ‘disintegrating’ showing more and more of the skeleton.

The dancers are also covered in posted notes which fall away during the dance in the middle section. This section is centralised around the notion that someone is becoming exposed, as if their armour is revealing their unprotected selves. It is important for the dancer to wear the minimum amount as the posted notes adhere best to the skin. I chose full coverage nude crop top and shorts, so that when the posted notes slip off the body there is a heightened sense of vulnerability, part of the life experience.