This new dance work from Claire Cunningham aims to look at identity through the prism of the Elvis tribute artist.
Created with an international team of leading performers, Thank You Very Much looks at notions of being told who or what we should be and explores the idea of self-tribute.
Choreographer Claire and her ensemble of leading disabled performers will invite audiences to join them for a drink at a Cheetham Hill social club as they pull back the curtain on the glittering world of the Elvis tribute artist.
Fresh from a crash course in Elvis-ing and intimate conversations with a range of tribute artists, Thank You Very Much takes to the floor in witty and revealing fashion. The company will pull on their rhinestone-studded jumpsuits to ask: are we caught in a trap?
Who have we been trying to be all our lives? Has it ever been our choice? And is anyone ever truly incomparable?
Claire said: “It’s a bit of a cliché to quote one of Elvis’s big hits but with this work I did consider for myself the question of “If I can dream…”. If I could dream of what I would like to make, who I would want to work with, what might be a better world for me…then it would be to see what work emerges from bringing together a group of exclusively self –identifying and disabled artists to contemplate ideas of comparison, of pressure to conform, of the phenomenal workload of unlearning what you have been forced to be.
“Of creating a world where those ideas can be taken apart, troubled, riffed on through a lens – the world of the Elvis Presley Tribute Artist -that is both fun and entertaining yet also brings home to me the importance of learning that what brings joy or value in people’s lives may be widely different but that we can learn to respect it if we truly take the time.”
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Thank You Very Much for MIF 2019
Venue: Ukrainian Cultural Centre, 31 Smedley Lane, M8 8XB
Dates: Wednesday 17th – Saturday 20th July
Cost: £20
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