Agnes

An Eco Docu-Fiction Ghost Story / Created By Bridget Fiske

'Agnes’ is a contemporary choreographic, cinematic, and exhibition work, which is equally intimate and austere, as it is epic and surreal. The work traverses across temporalities, histories, places, and realities - it is an experience of hauntings and spectres, created in the gaps of an archive of oral history, written records, and historical, cultural, embodied, scientific, and land-based knowledges.

'Agnes' spirals through time and stories of gender, class, labour-risks, migration, colonisation, a shipwreck, family, corporealities, extinction, and environments. It is a work of reckoning, repatriations, healing, and reverberations. 'Agnes' is a documentary, a forensic study, a channelling, a provocation, and a dream.

"Always surprising..The narrative was ghostly..." - Audience Member -

"..was complex and very interesting to me." - Audience Member -

2024-2025 Research & Development

Concept, Choreographer, Writer, Director, Performer and Co-Producer: Bridget Fiske

Dramaturgical, Performance, and Choreographic Researcher: Joseph Lau and Amy Voris

Audience & Engagement Dramaturge/Curator, and Environmental Responsibility Strategy Consultant: Michèle Steinwald

Academic Advisor, Open University: Dr Gunjan Sondhi

Moving Image and Lighting Designer: Andrew Crofts

Botanical Costume Consultant: Shahn Stewart

Sharing events to date with: Project Auske; MadeSc - Quarterly Artist Sharing; M.A.P; EXCHANGE in Dance24 (Metro Arts & Studio1)

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

Supported by: Sunshine Coast Council; Studio1; MAD Dance House; Open University; Company Chameleon; University of Salford; Canada Council For The Arts

BACKGROUND

This vision for developing, and creating ‘Anges', was formed via a 2021/2022 Arts Council England supported Developing Your Creative Practice grant focussing on the development of a writing practice in relation to Bridget’s Choreographic and Directorial practices.

Parallel research on ‘(sketching) Artefact A: The shipwreck - or - A short performance of the death and birth of the body of John Edwards' has occurred as part of the project ‘Sufi In The City’, where Fiske has been developing a performative score about the decomposition process of the human body. This research has also been supported by Dancenorth Australia’s Artist Residency in the Tropics (A.R.T.) Program.

Photographers: Steve Chong; Bridget Fiske; Point Of View Photography; Megan Rowland; NGCC