Scratched

Scratched began as an idea from a collective of artists who wanted to move but weren’t quite sure how. From the very beginning of the process, the material developed was ambiguous and fragmented, alluding to glimpses of context but never revealing anything as whole. There was a humour and a character in the un-finished/unpolished feel of the process which the company wanted to be present in the final product. The imagery in the show has been taken from various film trailers, the most prominent being A Clockwork Orange. The finished product is now so far removed from these films that they are barely recognisable at all, but the fragmented and inconclusive nature of the show is reminiscent of how film trailers are structured. The collaboration of seven un-trained movers meant that improvisation was also at the heart of the process. The repetitious and imperfect nature of the choreography that developed began to open up questions surrounding the legitimacy of technical dance and also the stagnancy of social politics. Scratched became less about what happens on stage, and more about how many times that thing happens with no conclusion – something which is hopefully readable in many different ways to many different audiences. Like too many film trailers playing on a loop, Scratched takes you to the heights and the depths, offering a string of tasters of something just out of reach – something beautiful, something meaningful, something worth all the effort. Snippets of various film trailers are revealed to the audience through the music and imagery, but they have been taken out of their original context and mixed with other art forms to create a new mode of communication.