From 2016 ResCen projects have been developed in partnership with the professional arts sector involving collaborations with independent artists and organisations such as Dance Umbrella, Sadler’s Wells, Complicité, Akram Khan Company, Avant Garde Dance, Hetain Patel and others. This is in tandem with significant international collaborations, particularly Danscross-ArtsCross with Beijing Dance Academy which began in 2009, a partnership that was extended in 2011 with the inclusion of Taipei National University of the Arts, and which now celebrates its 10th anniversary. It is set to be extended further when Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts joins us and hosts a creative process and performance project in 2022 (Covid-19 permitting).
Through all of these projects certain lines of enquiry interweave and, while specific approaches are adopted and adapted according to the needs of each project, the broad research concerns continue to cohere around processes, practices and contexts of performance as it is conceived, created, presented and made available through and in the arts marketplace.
‘…the most influential and consistently interesting theatre company working in Britain’
The Times
Complicité is an international touring theatre company based in London led by Artistic Director and co-founder Simon McBurney OBE. Complicité creates work that strengthens human interconnection, using the complicity between performer and audience that is at the heart of the theatrical experience. Complicité works across art forms, believing theatre, opera, film, installation, publication and participatory arts can all be sites for the collective act of imagination.
Complicité’s recent work at includes Beware of Pity, The Encounter, The Master and Margarita, Shun-kin and A Disappearing Number. Founded in 1983, the Company has won over 50 major theatre awards worldwide.
Complicité began life as a collective and this spirit of collective enquiry, of collaborative curiosity, has driven the work throughout its history. The Company is famous for making its work through extensive periods of research and development which brings together performers, designers, writers, artists and specialists from diverse fields to create the works – a process now known simply as ‘devising’.
Alongside Simon McBurney’s work the Company supports artists through the ‘Developed with Complicité’ strands. The Company is committed to widening access and pro-actively seeks to support talented artists who are under-represented in the theatre sector. Learning and engagement are central to its work and its award-winning Creative Engagement programme includes professional development, work in schools and colleges and participatory projects with a range of communities.
The Company is committed to responding to the climate and ecological emergency, and is a founder member of Culture Declares Emergency.
Website www.complicite.org
Twitter @complicite
Instagram @complicitetheatre
Facebook URL https://www.facebook.com/TheatredeComplicite/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/complicitecompany/
Project Team
Produced by
Complicité
Created by
Sasha Milavic Davies & Lucy Railton
Choreographed by
Sasha Milavic Davies
Composed by
Lucy Railton
Choreographic consultant
Frauke Requardt
Dance Captains: London
Antigone Avdi, Makiko Aoyama, Amanda Dufour, Valentina Formenti, Jennifer Irons, Camilla Isola, Ciara Lynch, Gabrielle Nimo, Claudia Palazzo and Inês Pinheiro
Dance Captains: Hong Kong
Rebecca Wong Mei Yuk, Emily Lee Wai Ling, Cybil Poon, Mary Jane Tang, Iris Tang Hiu Lam, Iris Wing Chi Lau, Vivian Liu, Emily Ng
Movement Archive
Interviews by
Chris Bannerman
Web & design
Andrew Lang
Video & editing
Ben Harvey
Archive film footage by
Plastik, Simon Eves at Stone Nest
Paria Kamya at Somerset House
Zuketa Ltd, Alice Doušová at Greenwich Peninsular
Still photography
Ali Wright, Katy Davies
First presented as part of Dance Umbrella, London 2018
All material copyright © 2020 ResCen Middlesex University and Complicité unless otherwise indicated
Further information: please contact rescen@mdx.ac.uk