The Difficult Comedown

Two women carry and haul, run, wait – and consider: what’s clearly necessary, right now? Each asks with all that she is. In duet the women age the body, expand it, injure it. They change. The dance dwells in an ecosystem of seasonality, a rhythm of work that allows the women to persist in unsentimental relationship to the earth. Meanwhile, they don’t have to take care of each other – but they do.

The Difficult Comedown was interested in shared resilience and the labour of women. It considered a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, past human predominance on earth. Borne of long-embodied knowledge, and compelled by wilfulness, this was a performance from the ground up: an immersion in slow change.

Performers Paea Leach and Alexandra Harrison shatter their solo lives to come down to earth. It is difficult, but they make mountains.

Presented by Arts House, Paea Leach and Alexandra Harrison as part of Dance Massive 2019