Wild Trio a.k.a. POP Corps is a foray into hyper-feminine synthetic fast fashion consumerism and ‘selfie’ culture.
Striking and surreal visual tableaux created to queer pop imagery. Dancers improvise with an excess of plastic and commercially produced fashion accessories to disguise their bodies, and install themselves within an oversaturated material landscape. From this excessively rich sensory experience, their movements emerge without control over the images created.
Visitors enter an upturned and activated space, simultaneously evoking a squat, post-shopping spree, or the aftermath of a bad Spring Break party. An imagined refuge from capitalism, it implicates the dancers as recovering consumer addicts.
Dancers animate the installations, led by their sensory perception inside the imagery. A cycle of mutation, distortion, and decomposition follows. Garish choreographies with grotesque facial expressions and sound effects repeat over a hollow karaoke backing track. ‘Organic’ movement breaks through as the manufactured breaks down.
Like weeds that grow through broken concrete, dances sprout through the cracks of a decaying consumer capitalist embodiment.
Wild Trio is a predecessor of Anthropo+Screen by-products.
Image: transparent plastic boot with neon green sole and laces hangs from a black vaccuum cleaner handle. A hand with a black shovel reaches for the boot
Image: Cathy Walsh, Gen Say, and Laura Doehler in Primark pink and tropical print clothing. They pose in gestures from 'Cheesy, Sexy, Body, Money, Party' song/score
Image: in between audience cycles, Cathy Walsh and Laura Doehler recline in armchairs while Gen Say does a handstand next to inflatable palm tree in Primark tropical print track suit
Image: transparent plastic boot with neon green sole and laces hangs from a black vaccuum cleaner handle. A hand with a black shovel reaches for the boot
Photos by Mark Loudon and Andrew Ness
Supported by
Arts Council England (for Wildness Lab research week)
Further support from residencies at the Bluecoat (Liverpool), Making Space at Decoda's Summer Dancing Festival 2014 (Coventry), The Firkin Crane (Cork) and The Bluecoat and Create Ireland’s Liverpool Ireland Cultural Corridor (LICC) travel bursary
Project History
A site-specific performance installation created for Tmesis Theatre's Physical Fest 2015. It began as an investigation of potential conflicts within trained bodies. Is there still ‘wildness’ in a trained body? It questions consumerism in society and in dance, where dancers consume training, and spectators consume trained bodies.
POP Corps was the next incarnation of the Wild Trio at the Firkin Crane.
created in collaboration with, and performed by
Laura Doehler (London), Genevieve Say (Birmingham), Cathy Walsh (Berlin)
and with Zinzi Buchanan (Berlin) at the Firkin Crane
Wildness Lab research collaborators
Aleasha Chaunte, Annie Lok, Harriet Latham, Melissa Pasut, Miriam Wolodarski
Making Space residency student collaborators
Abbie Hannaby, Melissa Ingles, Angelika Mizińska